Unforeseen issues are common to all product teams. In this year’s Study of Product Team Performance our latest regression analysis illustrates that a teams ability to quickly recover from an unforeseen issue, in the product development process, is highly correlated with superior performance. The inverse also holds true – teams that don’t recover quickly perform poorly.
One of Four Key Regression Analysis Findings
This year’s regression analysis uncovered four factors that further our knowledge about what differentiates high performing product teams from the pack.
All teams experience unforeseen problems, but organizations respond to them quite differently. Almost two-thirds of product teams struggle to get past unforeseen issues. While only 35% of product teams are able to quickly rally and nimbly handle unforeseen issues, our analysis shows that it’s these product teams that consistently overachieve.
Problem recovery is an essential skill for product teams that draws from the fabric of the company’s culture, talent pool, leadership, and creative thinking. Teams that take unforeseen problems in stride produce better results.
A Closer Look at the Data
How a company’s culture prepares its employees to handle and move past inevitable, unforeseen organizational issues is vital to staying competitive. According to our survey respondents, more than a third (35.4%) of their companies are able to respond quickly to difficulties and move past them.
Nearly half of respondents (48.7%) indicate that they eventually do move past unforeseen difficulties, but that it can take time. While 13.1% of respondents admit that their companies can get hung up on unforeseen issues and struggle to get past them, only 2.8% feel their organizations are ill equipped to face unforeseen issues and can rarely move past them to get on with the job at hand.
Conclusion: How Teams Handle Unforeseen Issues Matters
Our data clearly illustrates that product teams that have an aptitude for quickly addressing unforeseen issues perform at a higher level. However, most organizations are not aware of the impact of this single regression analysis factor. Executives who manage product development teams should keep an eye on this aspect of performance as it is a statistically significant indicator of how a particular team is likely to perform now and in the future.
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