I’ve always found 1-on-1s an extremely powerful management tool. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I am referring to a regular meeting with each of your first reports or your manager that is just the two of you maintaining the relationship, staying aligned, understanding goals and removing obstacles. Communication is a fundamental part of both leadership and management and it needs to be open, frequent and, importantly, two-way. A 1-on-1 is the perfect forum for ensuring this is being done effectively. It is not a team meeting. It is not a surrogate for some other project meeting you wish you’d had. It is about continual and constructive engagement, collaboration and growth.
Over the past few months I’ve had several conversations around the topic of the Minimum Viable Product [MVP] and prototyping as though they are, in some way, fundamentally different beasts. Personally, I see one as a subset of the other and view them both as part of a necessary continuum that helps maintain alignment and reduce risk during the new product development journey. Initially, you want to be sure that you’re building the right thing. Later, you want to deliver reliable functionality that makes good on the promise. In my mind, an MVP is simply one kind of prototype that happens to be focused on customer-centric issues related to desirability and viability.
Essentially, the level of engagement exhibited by an individual is predicated on both their capability and their motivation. BJ Fogg’s behaviour model suggests that these two factors must both be present at the time of some trigger event. The Fogg model is typically used by designers to influence the flow of user interaction with software. Of course, it can also apply to behaviour in a variety of other situations.
If we start from a position that an individual, team or organization has the necessary capability to act in a certain way (often the case) then the driving factor that will influence any behavioural outcome will be their motivation.