The key to successful engineering teams: The OTOG Principle

Here's the principle that has helped us generate 10x growth for our teams and clients. It's quite simple, but it challenges some deeply held (wrong) assumptions. Get your cup of coffee and dive in!

Have you ever wondered why some software teams seem to be in constant conflict between product ambitions and technical realities, while others achieve the impossible together?
Here's what I've learned about great teams, and great organizations from my experience as a developer, project manager, product manager, director of product, and running my own company as well as advising startups.

Throughout my career, I've learned that great software—and great teams—are built through shared leadership. Too often, companies fall into the trap of treating product and engineering as opposing forces, with competing priorities and separate objectives.

In reality, the best outcomes arise when product and engineering collaborate, driven by a crystal clear goal: delivering solutions to customers that impact the customer’s success, and our own business goals! This is not an easy process, and that’s why we need everyone onboard! Here’s how…

A Shared Leadership How To

Shared leadership is not a slogan; it’s a way of working that ensures decisions are made together by product and engineering. We manage the roadmap and the technical aspects together, not separately, always focusing on the goals we want to achieve. It’s not about “tech vs. product”—it’s about “tech and product” working hand in hand, every day!

This means that decision-making is fluid. At times, the product leads the discussion, while at others, engineering drives the process. It's the questions and problems we face that decide whose expertise is most relevant to move forward.

Shared leadership in practice is about creating space for different voices, ensuring that leadership emerges naturally based on the specific challenges at hand. The simple heuristic here is: always work from goals, and make sure you know who's on your team (as explained in our OTOG method). With OTOG, or One-Team-One-Goal method, we focus on creating clarity about who we can rely on (one-team), and always working from a goal (one-goal) that everybody knows, AND can measure.

Addressing the Challenges of Shared Decision-Making, A Simple Tool You Can Use Today!

A common misconception is that shared leadership leads to slower decision-making, and lack of clear ownership. In reality, this only happens in the absence of effective communication in the team.

The key to making shared leadership work is to work on those communication practices! For example, in our teams, we do this by reframing our daily meetings—focusing on "unusual questions" rather than routine status update questions Scrum teams usually cover (see this article on what those questions should be: How to Coordinate Remote Teams and Improve Collaboration).

When we focus on these unusual questions, we create room for creative problem-solving that help us address the blockers in real-time. We do this by using everybody's brain and creativity to detect and solve those problems.

Here's the key impact of those unusual questions in the Scrum Daily: we shift the focus from "what to do" to "what to achieve". This is a critical part of creating a collaborative, and shared leadership environment! Oh, and Product Owners are always involved! That's a must!

Product Meets Engineering: The Real-World Impact Of Teamwork

One of my favorite examples of shared leadership in action happened when we aimed to optimize a specific funnel in a client's product.

The Product Owner identified the opportunity and defined the goal, but we hosted a brainstorming session with engineering to generate different ideas on how we might achieve our goal.

Ultimately, the solutions proposed by product didn’t have that big of an impact, but an innovative idea from engineering did - and no one saw that coming! This outcome not only boosted our metrics significantly but also gave the team the satisfaction of saying to the CEO: “We paid your salary this year!”

Yes! That solution imagined by an engineer generated enough revenues on it's own to be higher than the CEO's annual salary!

This kind of success isn’t accidental; it’s the direct result of giving teams the autonomy to innovate while working towards a shared goal with very clear accountability: clear goal, clear metrics, and relentless follow-up!

Customer-First, Experimentation-Driven, The 1% Solution, And 24h Experiments

Starting from the customer's perspective is the core of how we work, and help teams (product+engineering) work. The customer's goal focus helps align both product and engineering towards impact, not just features.

When there’s tension between ambitious product ideas and engineering feasibility, focusing on the customer goal is a compass that directs experimentation.

For example, we often talk about the 1% solutions: What's a VERY QUICK way to check that we can achieve our customer goal? This drives our 24h experimentation approach (more on that later), which brings engineering and product together in a direct competition against time, and usually generates incredibly creative solutions.

Many of those solutions don't involve changing any code, and yet, engineering is onboard, and excited to contribute! This is what real product development should be: product and engineering together collaborating on how to achieve customer and business goals!

Here's a real-life story: In a recent engagement, the team identified a hypothesis for increasing conversion in a mobile app and crafted a quick, 24-hour experiment. The outcome? A 3x increase in conversion—all achieved without writing a line of code. It was the shared understanding of the goal and the collaborative experimentation between engineering and product that allowed us to avoid costly development and instead prioritize simple, high-impact changes.

The Power of Collaboration and Shared Leadership

The customer-first mindset, combined with a focus on experimentation, ensures that our teams are always working together on what matters most—Customer and Business impact!

Shared leadership and collaboration turn daily conversations into innovation and creativity sessions, and in the end, the results show it!

The environment we create is one where everyone understands the purpose of their work, and we relentlessly pursue that purpose in an iterative, experimental way.

In other words: Agile as if you really meant it! :)

It’s not about long roadmaps or rigid plans, but about having the courage to learn quickly and the discipline to execute once we find what works. And that learning cannot happen if only one side is driving!

Oh, And One More Thing...

Here's the critical thought: successful product and engineering leadership isn’t about finding a balance between competing priorities. It’s about getting a different type of conversation, where priorities align!

It’s about ensuring that teams work towards the same goals, lead where they’re strongest, and celebrate the incredible things they achieve together.

As I usually put it: One-Team-One-Goal.

If you don't have those, you are already doomed to mediocrity anyway! Start there!