The Hard Yards

The Hard Yards is a management consulting firm. The firm works to assist business owners and organizations by offering services in areas of business strategy, data analytics, design and architecture, agile product development, and information technology investment. To do this, The Hard Yards works with its clients to discover user needs, encourage creativity, apply forward-thinking methodologies, implement change, and work with those clients to deliver solutions. The company also offers immersive training and coaching support at all company levels to help organizations ensure changes stick.

The company was founded in 2014 by Jason Lamb and Mark Pushinsky and is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. The Hard Yards was, in part, founded to identify new ways to improve technology transition for U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The new approach was to introduce modern product management disciplines into the development and transition of technologies for USSOCOM. This led to the development of The Hard Yards as a product management consultancy. Some of the earliest clients of The Hard Yards included classmates and professors of Jason Lamb, such as Gus Nicoll and Jay Harrison.

Since that time, The Hard Yards has worked with the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Special Operations Command, Microsoft, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, DARPA, Capital One, McKesson, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Sentara, NSIN, U.S. Intelligence Community, AppDynamics, U.S. Department of the Navy, DAU, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Anthem, NATO, and ConnectWise.

The Hard Yards works with its clients in a framework-agnostic way, in which they educate, train, partner, coach, and advise on the transition of an engagement. This begins with an assessment of an organization's capabilities and strategic position and develops a roadmap for the engagement based on the identified preferred business outcomes. The Hard Yards suggests the delivery of their services based on concepts borrowed from Japanese martial arts, which follows a general guideline of learning the rules, in which the firm offers learning of theory and frameworks; breaking the rules, in which the firm works to apply theories to real work; and abandoning the rules, in which the firm works to help a client mix frameworks and discover innovations.

One of the services offered by The Hard Yards is organization transformation, to help clients to make a digital transformation, regardless of the technology and business model of the organization. The firm suggests their capabilities are industry agnostic and have worked in healthcare, financial services, insurance, and the federal government. To help the company through a transformation, The Hard Yards offers expert, immersive training, practical coaching support, and ongoing support to ensure the transformation achieves the desired results.

The Hard Yards also offers analytics and measurements to create alignment, provide focus, and help organizations track progress toward the client's goals. The firm uses an Objectives and Key Results (OKR) approach to develop and communicate measurements. This approach involves a clearly defined goal (objective) and specific measures to track performance against the objective (key results). All of these measures to track performance occur at different levels, such as the tactical, operational, and strategic.

To help organizations, The Hard Yards offers a Scrum Master Accelerator and Product Owner Accelerator. Both programs are developed to break an external coach dependency model with scalable solutions in which users learn and apply the skills necessary to become more effective in their roles.

The Scrum Master Accelerator is developed for organizations that want to build coaching competency from within but do not have the luxury of staffing full-time coaches for one-on-one training. The program works to teach users all the skills necessary to become effective in their roles and grow into coaches themselves.

The Product Owner Accelerator is developed for product developers new to or working to acquire the skills, tools, and techniques to be more capable and confident in the Product Owner or Product Manager role. The program offers a cohort-based, distributed learning experience developed for users working a traditional work week.

The Hard Yards offers commercial consulting services with a focus on product development. To do this, Hard Yards works to help commercial entities discover end-user or customer needs, apply necessary methodologies and implement necessary changes to meet those needs, and deliver a program of analytics to ensure the solutions are meeting the needs of the end-users and the organization. The firm's consulting services are industry agnostic, but they have often supported industries such as healthcare, financial services, and insurance.

The Hard Yards began thinking about bringing commercial product management best practices to the federal government, and since its founding, the firm has maintained that practice. The firm is also a member of the U.S. Small Business Chamber of Commerce.