Agile wisdom Shots#5 Shifting from project to product mindset

Agile wisdom Shots#5 Shifting from project to product mindset

When the world is embracing rapid change in the digital era, most of our traditional approach, beliefs, mindset, and practices may become obsolete and stops adding value.??

In this new era of rapid changes, we likewise have to shift our focus from managing output to managing outcomes. This philosophy can be represented by a project versus product mindset argument.?

In a nutshell project management focuses on the planning and follows a strict schedule to achieve its results. This approach is well-known by many organisations. Many organisations still work in this way.??

Product mindset however focuses more on the outcome and takes an agile approach to developing and delivering on a project.?

Before we discuss in detail the difference between a project and product mindset, let’s understand a little about each first.?

Project Mindset?

A project mindset is an approach to achieve an objective within a defined period.?

It is defined as a temporary initiate undertaken to accomplish a defined set of objectives in creating a product or a service.??

The traditional project management approach is based on effectively managing the budget, resources, scope, and time to get the desired output.??

It involves a detailed plan-based approach on business requirements, gathering of all required resources, defining the budget, and allocating people to the project team to ensure efficiency. It also requires periodic check-ins of the project’s progress to ensure effective management of budget, resources & alignment to scope.?

In the earlier days, project-centric thinking and waterfall methodology helped companies to perform elaborate planning and manage effectively to ensure alignment to the plan through periodic check-ins. Any deviation in the planned schedule, scope and resources act as warnings on the health of the project.??

In a project the work to be done is usually more predictable in advance. Hence the work is broken down into small tasks to enable planning of budget, resources, scope, milestones, output and time period required or the schedule.??

But as the industries change and the demand for faster execution and delivery increases, companies need to increase the speed of their delivery to keep up with the pace.?

It’s no surprise then, that the agile framework has gained popularity. Unlike the traditional waterfall project management methodology, agile helps develop iterative and incremental products. It also provides and encourages flexibility to address rapidly changing requirement.??

Basically, the old way of documenting and creating the entire product before it can be released has fallen out of favour for the faster prototyping of products via its MVP (minimum viable product).??

Product Mindset?

Having a product mindset means measuring the success of the outcome using business metrics like customer adoption and retention, income and cost saving generated through a feature. This also means achieving reduced waste, increased creativity, and frequent working releases.?

This is so that the company can release something quickly to the market, following which, make incremental updates to the product including new features over time (at a regular cadence) to keep customers engaged and happy.??

In a product-based agile approach, we focus more on outcome rather than output that are influenced by customer and market feedback. This can be considered as having a product development mindset instead.?

Unlike project management, which is a temporary endeavour, product development is a continuous process of delivering new features to the product over time to successfully meet the changing needs of the customer.?

This mindset is about working on creating a great customer experience, ensuring frequent releases, and primarily focusing on building the right product or service based on customer needs and feedback.?

When moving from a project to product mindset there is a shift that enables faster time to market, improved product quality and low-cost changes when responding customer feedback.??

Organisations with a product mindset often create customer-centric products while those with a traditional, project mindset might find that the time to market is long and the risk of being beaten to the punch by a competitor or changing market sentiment is high.??

When executed right, product management will improve the quality, deliver value to the user, and reduce the cost of change. The team also focuses less on factors such as timelines and budgets and more on the deliverables and outcome, resulting in a happier, more engaged team.?

Advantages of Product Mindset??

A product mindset fosters an environment where the team is focused on creating a right product strategy and vision to achieve customer satisfaction.??

This is done through the creation of a product roadmap which helps in effective prioritisation, increasing the value, reducing the risk as well as managing the dependencies when building a customer-centric product.??

A team with a product mindset is often encouraged to think and investigate the development by approaching things in the perspective of the customer.?

It also helps the team to think holistically about the business goals and how they are going to achieve product-centricity.?

Cultivating Product Mindset??

The product mindset demands a shift in four areas:??

1. Grow using the outside-in approach, rather than inside-out. (Market & User feedback)??
2. Start measuring time to value rather than time to market. (Focus on Outcome than output)?
3. Prioritise the Growth of the company over the perfection of the product. (Being iterative and incremental)?
4. Move towards Excelling at Change over Welcoming Change (Leveraging change over, reacting to change)?

Moving Project based funding to Product based Funding??

Product-based funding allow you to allocate an investment to a product line where you can map investment money to the resources as needed, instead of working on unpredictable features.?

The major advantage of product-based funding is it encourages through flexibility and collaboration, for teams to experiment, fail fast and learn to adapt to these changes in order to deliver a customer-centric product.??

Shifting from Project focus to Product Horizons ?

The strategy involved in the project is to break down the task and create milestones to track the progress. This project mindset approach focuses more on the work whereas in Product mindset the strategy involved focuses on the objective as defined by the product vision.??

They come up with product stories which are user journey and user stories to help the team focus more on the customer impact and the outcome.?

Evaluate problem fit discovery to enable product fit delivery?

Product Mindset helps you to discover the problem fit and helps to validate it before building the actual product.???

This problem fit validation involves three steps:??

1. Identifying the problem?
2. Creating a value proposition?
3. Validating the assumptions to understand the product market fit?

The problem fit validation is done even before the development; hence it saves a lot of time and heavy investment from building a wrong product.??

It is validated multiple times using customer surveys & feedback, prototypes, MVP, Wizard of Oz techniques etc.??

Once validation is completed, the team invests and starts work on building a product toward an ideal market fit as defined by user feedback.??

Conclusion??

All companies aim to work on building what their customer wants and needs. To develop a product mindset, we need to go beyond measuring simple project matrixes to understand the user first.??

We need to test our assumptions and build a product that can add value to our customers.??

We also want to build without burning out our team. The real shift that is needed by our team is moving from asking them self,” Are we building things, right?” to “Are we building the right things?”??

When companies and teams are moving towards a product mindset, it involves work which demands a lot of mental effort. This move towards customer-centricity brings a shared vision among the teams.??

In a product mindset approach, we focus on improvement and frequent shippable releases. We measure the cycle time, work in progress and resolution time - areas that focus on improving the outcome.??

In the end, having a product mindset gives the team clarity on what they are building and how they are going to add value to the customer.?