How do you foster a product culture and mindset that supports your product strategy?

There is a very serious mistake in this management strategy laid out in this article that it has replaced the role of the customer and the role of the product with each other. The entire view has been written as if the product is the customer.

“No wind is favorable, if a sailor does not know to which port to sail.” The quote belongs to Seneca, a Latin stoic philosopher. To get support from the broad organization, PMs need to define the right “port”, a clear strategy that starts with “customer obsession”, to understand how customers think, operate and speak. Then build around customer needs, or “jobs-to-be-done” (JTBD). Questions I always ask myself and people around me - How do you get to know your customers and their JTBD? Do you speak to your customers directly? How often? Do you double-click on what you hear? If your strategy is aligned with customer needs and there are the right feedback loops, it's easier to align an org around a vision and drive plans.

Work with the product management team and relevant stakeholders to define a product vision that aligns with the company's overall strategy and goals. This will help everyone in the company understand where it is headed and what they must focus on. Use stories to illustrate your vision in action. This can help your team visualize what success looks like and how they can contribute to achieving it.

To get buy-in for product strategies, PMs need to think holistically about their product success to truly understand business challenges from an inside-out and outside-in perspective. The best strategy may not involve new features; it may be other investments - partnerships, technology improvements, marketing, etc. Focus on inside-out to understanding the competing priorities of your broader organization. If your CEO is focused on margins, you aren't going to get anywhere proposing an expensive new product investment. Focusing on outside-in means truly understanding the business needs of your buyers and users. Their challenges may require a focus on how to improve internal adoption or how to reduce maintenance costs.

By defining and communicating your product strategy effectively, you create a common understanding and alignment across the organization. This shared vision enables teams to work towards a common goal, encourages collaboration and cross-functional cooperation, and empowers individuals to make informed decisions that align with the overall strategy. A strong product culture and mindset emerge when teams are inspired by the product strategy, rally behind it, and take ownership of their contributions.

Involving engineers and designers in the early stage of the product helps in developing the product culture in an organisation. Often, they are involved after the business need has been agreed between Product Managers and Stakeholders. Similarly, involving stakeholders during the implementation process, for high level discussions will foster product culture. I’ve seen this method working in my Product Management experience at Bigbasket. ??

One effective way to involve teams in product discovery/delivery process is D.A.R.E. framework: Define, Align, Refine, and Execute. ??Define: Start by defining the product vision, strategy, and goals, and communicate them clearly to the team. This will help them understand the big picture. ??Align: Align team around shared understanding of customer needs and pain points ??Refine: Encourage the team to experiment and iterate on the product based on data and insights, and to continuously refine their approach. ??Execute: Empower team to make informed and effective decisions, and give them the autonomy to execute on their ideas.

Regular customer research is crucial to know what customers want and how the company can meet their needs. An internal team can be built to conduct research on customers and the market but also build a cadence for ongoing feedback , research, validation, and insights collection. A continuous feedback loop to collect customer feedback and insights will help the company stay connected with the market and respond quickly to changing needs. Make sure your product teams have access to customers - organizations that block their product team from meeting customers or allowing it only through the business team are failing their team and their work will become disjointed, unfocused and disjointed.

Creating a robust product culture is like building a two-way street between your product development teams and customers from the get-go. Picture your engineers and scientists gaining firsthand insights, understanding customers' real needs and issues. This gives your team a backstage pass into users' lives, stoking a sense of ownership and empathy. This way, they're not just building a product; they're crafting solutions for real people. Early customer exposure fuels informed decisions, sparks innovative solutions, and aligns your product strategy to resonate with users. Ultimately, a product culture truly blossoms when the customer is not just an endpoint, but as partners in development.

It's critical to involve the team in the process and communicate the product strategy so that they understand the overall objectives. Once they do, they can take ownership with how their work fits into the big picture. This can be done through meetings and other ongoing communication to keep the product strategy top of mind. Involving all team members such as designers and engineers and encouraging experimentation promotes a culture of innovation as team members collaborate cross-functionally. This breaks down silos and allows each person to contribute new ideas from their area of expertise.

You should have a process and framework in place for gathering feedback and sharing progress with stakeholders during the development process. The product mindset implies ongoing contact with stakeholders. It’s not a matter of gathering customer feedback and then disappearing to develop your product. You need an ongoing cycle where the team can share demos or other artifacts with stakeholders as the development of the new solution unfolds. Ideally, your product development process enables you to receive iterative feedback throughout the development cycle.

When considering a shift in product culture and mindset, it can help to think about it from a Change Management perspective. Using Prosci's ADKAR? Model as a framework here: ?? Awareness: work with an executive sponsor to create awareness about product strategy, principles and rituals ?? Desire: show your team how this change benefits them personally and what's in it for them ?? Knowledge: offer training, coaching or other resources to facilitate the shift and address any skill gaps ?? Ability: take steps to ensure your teams have the bandwidth and ability to embrace the change ?? Reinforcement: use positive feedback, rewards and recognition to encourage your teams

Have an intake process in place - An intake process is a transparent way for product leaders to take in new requests and act on them. The intake process acts as a conduit for processing and prioritizing stakeholder feedback. If feedback appears here and there throughout the development process, the result can be incoherence and lack of direction. A formal intake process, led by a senior person who encompasses marketing and technical capabilities, is the special sauce that can make the difference in creating products customers love.