Do HR, Finance, and Legal Make Products?

I work with a lot of product teams. These are the people who are responsible for the way an organization delivers and captures value. That’s the definition of a product. However, these are not the only people in an organization who make something. In fact, I believe every person in an organization makes a product. That product may not be something tangible used by customers outside the organization but it is certainly something that affects the lives of its “users.” Every process, policy, initiative or campaign is an attempt by someone in the company to change the behavior of someone else in that company.

When the Finance team changes the expense reimbursement policy, they are launching a “product” to be used by “customers.” In this case, those customers are internal staff who incur expenses during the execution of their jobs. And the goal of this change? To achieve an outcome; to change the behavior of the staff who use that policy and the team who processes those expenses. When the HR team implements a new vacation policy, they too are launching their product. Their goal is to drive an outcome as well — a change in the way the staff behaves AND provide an added value for those considering applying for positions with the company in the hopes of increasing the number and quality of applicants.

The rallying cry of the agile organization these days is “outcomes over outputs.” However, this mindset of continuous improvement, learning, and customer-centricity need not be limited to customer-facing initiatives. In fact, if we want to introduce the benefits of agility to the entire organization it’s imperative that we change the mindset of what are traditionally not “product-focused” disciplines. In the same way that launching a new product or service without testing it is highly risky, launching a new way of working, an internal process or incentive program faces the same risks. What if employees don’t adopt it? What if they don’t behave the way we expect? What if we roll this out to everyone and it actually creates a backlash that impacts employee morale or retention rates? These are all questions that should be asked.

3 examples of reframing “non-product”work as customer-centric initiatives with outcomes as their measures of success

Process changes, initiatives, programs and policies should be treated as hypotheses. Instead of saying, “We will implement an unlimited vacation policy by Q1 2020” HR teams must reposition their work as a testable statement with clear success criteria. “We believe that giving every employee unlimited vacation will ensure a fresh, healthy workforce and we will know this is true when we see a 20% increase in the amount of paid time off requested” is a far safer way of thinking about these types of initiatives. By simply rephrasing the initiative this way, we’ve moved the HR team away from fetishizing the “launch of the initiative” and have focused them on the intended results. What if 20% more paid time off doesn’t happen? What if, instead, people take LESS time off? (which is exactly what happens with teams in the United States when this policy is instated).

Reframing the work of non-product teams as hypotheses gets us to the question “Why are we doing this?” much sooner than these teams normally would. It introduces them to the idea that they have “customers” and that the success of those customers is directly connected to their own success. It moves the focus off the delivery of the policy or initiative and, instead, to the process of de-risking the initiatives before they are broadly rolled out. It also forces them to get to know their target audience more intimately. Essentially, it provides a path to make them more agile and in doing so makes the broader agile transformation of the organization that much more likely to succeed.