About Common Language©
We’re helping product teams increase dev velocity & UX quality at scale.
The Problem
In product and innovation teams, it's crucial that everyone has a collective understanding of user needs and top level business goals. Our team’s ability to collectively (and effectively) solve problems matters.
Currently we are seeing 65% of R&D going to waste, decreasing ROI on product efforts, increasing costs and risk, declining product and tech employee satisfaction, and increased burnout.
Making matters worse, today there is a plethora of product operation buzzwords, trends, acronyms, and strategies, oftentimes rebranded and repurposed for differentiation leading to more confusion than clarity.
There’s agile, scrum, kanban, lean, waterfall, SAFe (versions 1-6), ProductOps, DevOps, DesignOps, and YouName. What does it all f***ing mean?
If only a small percentage of your team truly understands these operational models how valuable can they really be?
We're tired of endless bureaucratic product operation meetings and reorganizations. We believe there’s a better way.
Why Now?
During the industrial age the assembly line was born, improved upon, and scaled throughout companies all over the world.
Today more companies are becoming digitized and software based, shifting operational models away from the top down assembly line model towards a continuous development operational model that is guided by two-way conversations with customers.
Agile continuous development becomes increasingly difficult for organizations to achieve as they scale and grow. Software company or not, agile is far more difficult to become in practice than in theory.
The agile product operational model becomes even more allusive for organizations to adapt with such little consensus on key terminology and the lack of a comprehensive industry wide best practices standard.
While organizations are finally prioritizing agile practices, they can’t afford to waste valuable resources on product operation methods that fall short or create never ending bureaucratic debate rather than team congruency and positive outcomes.
The need for a best practices baseline framework that is opinionated, accessible, and scalable has never been greater.
Common language has componentized product operation best practices within a cohesive framework that can be filtered, viewed, and shared based on department or function. These components also support scalability and agility.
The Common Language Framework© includes an interconnected roadmap with OKR inputs, feature prioritization methodology, a feature generation process, PRD/ticket structure with hypothesis input, ready-for-handoff Figma file, usability testing scripts, user testing repository, and much more.
The Common Language Solution
There are two fundamental pillars required to successfully optimize product operations within an organization.
The first pillar is a framework or model that captures product strategy, important marketing, product, design, and engineering considerations, and interdependent departmental work.
The second is a collective product thinking mindset. Successfully getting buy-in from key stakeholders, department leads, and individual contributors before attempting reorganizational efforts is important for long term success.
Design and product thinking practices are strategically placed at the core of our framework providing needed guardrails to effectively align teams while also providing the needed flexibility to achieve organizational goals (OKRs).
Each module within our framework includes educational resources. Additional team coaching & training is also available.
Oh and our framework templates are available in the tooling format of your choice.
Wether you’re a stakeholder, product manager, product designer, engineer, or marketing pro the truth is that great products are built by properly aligned teams that know how to continuously deliver valuable outcomes.
Our framework will iteratively evolve and get smarter over time. This is part of the continuous development process, we will continue to get better as we learn more.
We invite you to join our waitlist and help us move innovation forward with a “common language” for product builders and professionals everyw.
Hypothesis
Our BIG hypothesis: if at the very least, we help define a “common language” among product teams, improved innovation outcomes will be achieved.
VISION
Our vision is to move innovation forward with accessible and opinionated product operation frameworks and strategy support.
Our principles
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It is one thing to tell someone how to solve a problem. It is an entirely different thing to roll up your sleeves and help others solve their biggest most complex challenges. We believe product leaders should lead more by doing and less by talking about potential solutions.
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While launching an early stage MVP can be done by a scrappy few, successfully iterating on and scaling products over time requires effective cross functional operations. We believe optimized product operations is a fundamental component to building successful products.
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If your product team is not continuously uncovering user wants and delivering solutions without out top down feature requests or outside consultants then you don’t have a properly functioning product team. Our goal is to instill continuous discovery and delivery practices within your team as efficiently and effectively as possible.
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Design, engineering, and product debt is created when problems compound over time. Systemic solutions that are effectively implemented are necessary to stay ahead of product team inefficiencies.
Join Waitlist
Access the Common Language Framework©, live workshops, and community of supportive product professionals.