Lost in a Sea of Buzzwords - Clarifying the Shift from Projects to Products

"Tracking activities and budgets provides a false sense of security that may become apparent only when the software product hits the market." —Mik Kersten, author, “Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework”

Lost in a turbulent sea of transformation buzzwords, Project to Product is often misunderstood, underutilized and dreadfully ignored.

Ever since 2019, when Mik Kersten released his book “Project to Product” the IT world has been convincing CIOs that the traditional project management mindset is impeding agility and continuing with the status quo isn’t going to cut it. Without addressing an organizations old project policies that get in the way, agile transformations will remain an IT only prerogative and will never truly make it up to where the real decisions are made. Well intentioned organizations might as well be mixing water with oil when leveraging traditional project management with agile transformation strategies. 

Shift to Product is a combination of cultural philosophies, organizational agility constructs of agile portfolio management that decreases an organization’s chance of false sense of security. 

Thought leaders like Kersten discovered alternatives to project management to support agile ways of working with a clever mindset shift replacing traditional on-time & on-budget thinking. The gap that once existed between business and IT is rapidly closing.

Here are 3 things to expect when your organization makes the shift to product management paradigm:

1.      Metrics that drive results

Metrics keep people up at night. It is what matters most to any single organization, or individual. They directly give team direction and sense of purpose. Project management metrics track tasks, product metrics track outcomes. By shifting the organization to track outcomes, you empower your teams to discover the right tasks that will formulate the desired results.

2.      Give a large organization a small team feel

As organizations grow, silos are created that slow down delivery. In addition, organizations inadvertently create blind spots across the delivery pipeline. Departmental silos move people apart and creates bureaucracy, while product thinking aims to connect people across departments into a single network razor focused on delighting customers. This means bringing people across the organizations together from finance, cyber, talent, marketing and application development and organizing teams no matter how diverse in skillset around a single, common mission. This alone will better define value for your teams, define how it flows through the organization and make bring you one step closer to eliminate eliminating inefficiencies. Bringing people together for the long term, creates alignment, transparency and uncovers exposes inefficiencies across your value stream.

3.      Features are tested for assumptions

The biggest and greatest advantage creating a product environment is realized when behind every practice, ceremony or standard you are indirectly asking are we building the right things and how will we know? Building great products is a journey of trial and error. Isn’t that the heart of agile manifesto after all? We don’t know what we don’t know until we start to build it and need an environment that allows us to figure it out along the way. The definition of done bar just got higher. In shift to product, features are done after they are measured against the intended result; enabling the business to make more informed decisions.