The case for Product Excellence

What is Product Excellence, and why does it matter?

Product Excellence (slightly broader scope than Product Operations) is to the product organization, what product managers are to their products. A Product Excellence team is responsible for the successful running of the day-to-day operations of the product team, and it's effective integration within the wider business.

Product Excellence builds the processes and systems that allow the product organization to excel at their craft in a cross-functional way and then gets out of the way, so teams can deliver value autonomously.

It is the brain behind how the product team operates. It adapts to the ever-changing context of the organization and places its focus and energy where the product org needs it most at a certain point in time.

In larger organizations, this role is a huge catalyst as it ensures that there is a level of consistency to how teams operate product development. For example, as a product organization scales from 5 teams to 15 teams, you ideally want to avoid having 15 different ways of doing product.

The term product excellence is relative new and not very widespread. While some people might argue that it is not pragmatic enough, I prefer the term Product Excellence because it conveys the idea of refining the craft of product management over time.

It is not about nailing the next release but elevating the level of execution across the board, so the team can deliver positive outcomes for the business.

What it is not

• Product Excellence is not a band-aid to the general inefficiencies of the product organization.
• Product Excellence is not a glorified project management role.
• Product Excellence is not composed of a group of agile coaches.

In the following sections, I'll share some insights into how Product Excellence can

Core tenets of Product Excellence (PE)

From my experience and collaboration with executives who have rolled out Product Operations successfully, there are 3 key areas to Product Excellence.

Data & Insights

PE is responsible for the democratization of data access and assists the product organization to become self-sufficient and autonomous in their use of data to inform decision-making.

There are 2 common setups for this:

1. Data & Insights operate as a service adjacent to the product org.

In this scenario, the PE team's role is to work with the data & insights team to deliver the necessary information in a way that is granular enough so the product teams can slice and dice the data as they need.

2. Data & Insights are embedded in product teams and have a strong partnership with PE

Here - in my preferred approach - we increase the autonomy of the product team and bring additional substance and confidence in day-to-day decisioning as the product trio becomes a quartet with a data analyst.

This means that the PE team becomes a centre of excellence for everything Voice of Customer.

Practices & Processes

PE is the driving force behind making sure that multiple product teams operate in a unified, standardized way, i.e. producing similar deliverables for each stage of the product development process, running similar activities and sharing a common level of execution.

As a company grows and more and more teams are spun up to develop new features and services, a huge part of the success of the PE team is focusing on the adoption of standardized practices across the organization.

Go-to-Market & Content Strategy

In many tech companies, the activities of the product management team are concentrated around delivery and getting a feature or work increment "out the door". Once it's live, the job is considered done.

PE recognizes that there's such a thing as a product lifecycle including proper releases (release notes, user guides, knowledge base content, internal training to support sales and customer success, support material for customer care teams, etc.).

PE provides the operational support and framework to ensure the end-to-end experience of a product is a success.

Product Excellence at Uberall has helped Product Managers streamline the "why" and "who" aspects of their developments to anticipate the go-to-market strategy.

For instance, we sell to Enterprises and Partners across various verticals and languages. Previously, PMs would go live without elaborating on the limitations of their features, leading to readiness expectations from clients and underdelivering when it came to success teams' activation efforts.

With a tool like ProductBoard, PMs are forced to think forward their new launches and have conversations across the organisation to ensure that the features they are building are gonna be immediately relevant for the most ready-to-pay-for-it / ready-to-use-it customers. Manon Robineau - Director of Product at Uberall

Behaviours > Playbooks

The biggest pitfall with this dimension of PE is that, in many cases, focus is on outputs, i.e. creating playbooks for how activities should be conducted.

Instead, I would focus on adoption. The outcome for a PE team is to ensure Practices & Processes are adopted sustainably and evolve when necessary.

This means helping ICs and managers roll out and maintain practices in their respective teams. A concrete way to do this is to have PE team members act as coaches to help team members better integrate new practices, processes and behaviours over time.

Another prevalent antipattern when implementing Product Excellence initiatives across the organisation is adopting a dogmatic stance. If my experience has taught me anything, it's that context is key and that response to each situation has to be adapted. It's also fair to say that I've never seen product done successfully "by the book". The craft itself requires a huge amount of resilience, adaptability and self-awareness. Failure to adapt will likely result in poor adoption of whatever recipe the PE team comes up with to support the wider org.

Communities of practice

There will be a number of experimentations of new ways of doing things. However, it will be equally rare that these experimentations are documented and shared across the business.

The PE team's role is to align teams on best practices in line with company context and culture and ensure adoption within the product organization.

One way to do this effectively is to create a support system (the right infrastructure) for teams. This can take shape in many ways e.g. office hours, regular "product or ops clinics", ritualised events like show & tells, so people from different teams can come together, learn and refine their craft.

This is not limited to product management, it is a positive behaviour that transcends business unit boundaries.

Program Management

With the growth of the product management function, Program Management is instrumental in removing roadblocks for product teams and increase collaboration with adjacent teams. Program Management here is composed of 2 areas:

1. Product Enablement is about providing teams with the necessary tools and resources, so they can operate within optimal parameters.

Straight off, this is not about buying software for teams, but more about defining the activities and the means necessary for the teams to operate with minimal friction.

A concrete example of this is helping a team faced with challenges around how they build up customer knowledge through time and how to structure, augment and access that knowledge over time.

This means running discovery with internal stakeholders to understand the challenge, identify opportunities and solutions, and deliver something that can address that challenge. PM101.

2. Cross-functional alignment is key in raising the standards of practice for the company.

You might be more familiar with this second component, which has a lot to do with managing cross-functional dependencies between teams.

This is one of the most painful areas in transformation contexts: silos between teams mean that transverse projects, technical migrations or sometimes even simple feature releases are subject to important delays and de-prioritisation because of dependencies.

PE aims to resolve this with embedded Program Managers who can work across product groups to raise awareness on dependencies, evaluate risks and provide clear remediation action plans to re-risk delivery initiatives across the product org.

Program Managers across teams can belong to the same chapter, fostering organic and regular communication across verticals.

Signs your company needs Product Excellence

• Lack of transparency between teams
• Your revenue teams (sales/customer success) are not aligned with the product team
• Your product launches are below the mark. i.e. it feels like you're launching when you're not actually "ready".
• Hard to handle dependencies between teams
• No unified playbook for product development activities

Product Excellence is key in scaling product management

In scale ups or larger companies undergoing transformation to a user-centric, product-aligned model, PE can be a powerful driver.

PE is there to ensure the effective flow of information and the right level of proactive collaboration between product teams and other areas of the business (e.g. Finance, Revenue teams, Legal, Customer Success, etc.).

PE Managers (or Product Operations Managers) are true servant leaders who are there to support the product team in delivering the best outcomes possible for the business.

How to build out your Product Excellence teams

While most Product Operations managers will usually come from customer success, management consulting or project management, building a product excellence organization requires expertise in product management.

When hiring a Product Excellence leader, make sure you're hiring someone who has operated as a product manager and have extensive experience working within product teams and understands the dynamics of doing product at scale.

The reality of product organizations is that Chief Product Officers already have a lot on their plate. Appointing a VP of Product Excellence is a good way to ensure that the team will continue to grow and excel sustainably.

If you're thinking about starting a Product Excellence team or just curious about product transformation, I'd love to connect. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.