Product Aligned Operating Model and Platform as a Product

Off-late there has been a discussion on how Platform as a Product has emerged as a disruptive force in business,?enabling organizations with faster time to market , improve consumer experiences, and drive innovation. Below is my perspective on this topic.

Every business today is a digital business which means that technology is no longer just a supporting function, but a core driver of business strategy and success, impacting all aspects of an organization. All successful organizations today are reinventing themselves through digital transformation, which involves using technology to reinvent business models, improve customer experiences, and create new value. One of the components of Digital transformation is the transformation of the IT operating model to a product aligned operating model to break silos between business to IT to enhance the end user experience.?

Accenture's approach to Product aligned operating models is based on 7 fundamental principles

Customer-Centricity and End user experience - Prioritizing end user/developer needs and preferences throughout the product development lifecycle, from ideation to delivery and beyond.

Agile and Iterative Development - Embracing agile methodologies and iterative processes to facilitate rapid experimentation, innovation, and adaptation to changing market conditions.

Value Creation - Helping clients think about growth potential by using active insights to fuel optimizations that enable future scale.

Continuous Delivery and Feedback Loops - Emphasizing continuous delivery and rapid feedback loops to allow teams to iterate quickly, respond to customer needs, and make data-driven decisions.

Business Agility - The product operating model aims to build business agility by enabling organizations to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.

Platform based Delivery – To improve developer productivity and experience leveraging automation and repeatable use case

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?An increasing trend in Platform engineering today is to treat Platform as a Product (PaaP) rather than just a technology. Before we get into PaaP, lets first understand why we need platforms to drive business value. A technology platform is the foundation for building and running business applications and business products. The platform allows end users and developers to develop the applications faster without worrying about the underlying technology and infrastructure. In short, i

1.????? Supports business in scaling their revenues through faster (Business) Product development thus helping in faster time to market and increased business value

2.????? Improve reliability and resiliency of the products

3.????? Reduce cost by automating tasks and streamlining processes and self-serviceability

So, what is Platform as a Product or PaaP. Basically, it means that a platform should be built using a product mindset. In other words, it should

1.????? Follow the principles of Product Management - From conceiving, defining, delivering, monitoring and refining products to meet the end user requirements. However, the focus here is being Customer centric and not product centric.

2.????? Build features based on functional requirement.

3.????? It should deliver outcomes based on product roadmap with feedback from the end users and developer community.

4.????? The outcome should be linked to the golden paths and templates

PaaP should be designed with the end user in mind and built using the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then pilot and iterate based on learnings to gain confidence in product-market fit, scaling and evolving to maximize value. It evolves its capabilities over a period interacting with the end users. ?PaaP should be able to deliver multiple use case but not necessarily all the use cases. That is the reason why a good PaaP should be just “big enough” but no bigger. The use cases are delivered using self-service APIs, tools and processes. Generally, its built and maintained using multi skilled and multi-disciplinary work force and hence talent transformation is an important aspect of PaaP.

So how do we measure the success of PaaP. Some of the KPIs to measure the success of PaaP include

• adoption (number of end users using the platform, consumption per user and per product)
• End user satisfaction (NPS, customer feedback)?
• performance (uptime, throughput, response time)?
• delivery efficiency (velocity, cycle time, roadmap delivery)

In short, PaaP provides a game-changing way to build and deliver business products or services. It has emerged as a disruptive force in business,?enabling organizations with faster time to market , improve consumer experiences, and drive innovation.