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Louron serves as the Editor at Mind the Product, bringing nearly a decade of experience in editorial positions across business and technology publications. For any editorial inquiries, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Louron Pratt

<p>In this <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtpengage/hamburg/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MTP Engage Hamburg</a> talk, Björn Waide, Managing Director at Haufe-Lexware shares his experiences on building a free-thinking innovative culture. His key points include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Transitioning your organisational structure</li>
<li>Dealing with complex business decisions and product ideas</li>
<li>Challenges with an innovative culture</li>
</ul>
<h2>Transitioning your organisational structure</h2>
<p>Björn discusses the early stages of working at a start-up and the cultural path that his teams have been on. After years of being in an efficient and rigid thinking organisation, he says that they often suffered from suggesting ideas that have been done before.</p>
<p>How do you become more innovative as a company after the initial exciting years of working in a start-up environment? The solution was to remove all managers and rigid hierarchies within the organisation. “Everyone was assigned their budget and people took holidays when they wanted,” Björn says. “But as you can imagine, it wasn’t a simple task to instil this culture and reap the rewards.”</p>
<p>Björn explains how the organisation used the ocean as a metaphor for the right organisational structure. &#8220;You notice something is wrong with the business by looking at the waves, such as job retention or lack of productivity. While this is the most visible part of the issue, the culture and structure are the underlying problems that create the waves.</p>
<figure style="width: 1862px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/d087d458-cec8-4aa8-9bed-512192b3041b_Screenshot202021-10-0720at2015.10.46.jpg" alt="" width="1862" height="1040" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Björn Waide speaking at MTP Hamburg</figcaption></figure>
<p>You can’t directly change culture, without having any idea of where they want to go with the structure of the business. This will subsequently affect the culture which will eventually have a positive impact on the pattern.</p>
<h2>Dealing with complex business decisions and product ideas</h2>
<p>Björn says that companies are more often than not having to deal with complex business decisions. To find the solution to these issues, avoid relying on the highest-paid person in the room, he explains. “Teams often assume that the HiPPO is the most reliable which sometimes results in the wrong decisions being made,” Björn says.</p>
<p>To counter this culture, Björn forces teams to provide feedback on why certain ideas shouldn’t be included on a product roadmap. “Although it may be difficult for the creator of the idea to listen to this criticism, it creates a culture of honest feedback.” if you don’t consider all of the feedback in the room then mistakes and flaws will appear in decisions later down the line. Afterwards, the teams are then asked to say positive things about the ideas that they criticised.</p>
<p>Björn explains that if all teams provide both positive and negative points, it gives the creator of the idea a chance to incorporate all-encompassing feedback into their new feature/idea.</p>
<h2>Challenges with an innovative culture</h2>
<p>During organisational change, Björn learned that you can’t be an efficient well-oiled business as well as a free-thinking innovative organisation that runs several overlapping experiments. Björn explained that they decided to focus more on an innovation-focused business rather than sticking to their previous business model.</p>
<p>An important aspect of the project was the freedom of information. Through internal messaging tools like Slack, they made all groups and channels public for all people to see.</p>
<p>There were some conflicts along the way. External partnerships rely heavily on seniority and hierarchies. He explains how they had to tweak their culture slightly for the outside world to ensure that there were key decision-makers for external parties to regularly communicate with these external organisations.</p>
<p>Björn closes by saying that this organisational restructure is a long windy road with many more challenges along the way. But the definitive goal of developing the business into an innovative free-thinking agile culture will soon become the new way of working.</p>
<p>Discover more content on <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/tag/team-alignment/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Team Alignment</a>.</p>


core/freeform

Making product magic with cross-functional collaboration by Ebi Atawodi

10 years Wiser: Lessons learned from scaling Wise by Nilan Peiris

Breaking down misconceptions to create healthier teams by Adrian Howard

Creating courageous product teams with Yi-Wei Ang

Mastering perspective – zoom in, zoom out as a product leader by Navya Rehani Gupta

Building healthy and high performing teams with West Monroe

The importance of psychological safety for remote teams by Diana Stepner

Common transformation pitfalls by Marty Cagan

Building a digital product organisation, brick by brick by Nils Michaelis

Product, dance, and pockets of brilliance by Pippa Topp

Org charts eat culture for breakfast: Why an agile mindset alone won’t help you by Björn Waide

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