Product management approach to creating great software products is not new, and its core philosophy largely has remained the same over last decade. It, however, adopted new way of global working and technologies in web-cloud world. Customer Experience focus and product experience, of course has been pivotal as we operate in digital environment. Managing the product with experience focus and for global scale necessitated change across our product lifecycle.
Other than those adoptions, why should companies transition to a Product Operating Model to be successful in creating successful products that customers love ? After a spirited debate with several product leaders this weekend working in large and small product companies, I took to pen my views. Views expressed are of my own, and solicit your views.
So what's makes the "Product-Centric Operating Model" , and what changes needs to be incorporated to make the transition ?
- ?Engineering Agility on Steroids to drive continuous innovation: No more 3-6 months releases but up to several times/day. The change most discussed is how we engineer/build products has been revolutionized. Readily available toolset for DevOps, infrastructure-as-code and automation makes it easier. It's not just following Agile ceremonies as a process, but ensuring faster impact i.e. production deployments happening frequently avoiding monthly-quarterly release cycle. Location independent agile with workflow collaboration technologies must be adopted. Cloud has helped us to engineer rapidly and scalable, and now AI/Generative AI will bring further tools to speed up and do things better. Technical architecture designed has to facilitate incremental updates. Finally what matters is for customers to experience the product features/innovation expeditiously.
- Outcome driven vs Output driven : are we just converting requirements to feature releases mechanically, or we are thinking about about what outcomes are we achieving with each deployments. Do we have a outcome measurement approach and how do we take customer feedback. This is a huge change product organizations needs to go through to ensure that product management is committed to delivering outcomes and engineering teams are structured to deliver
- Deciding which problems to solve first : While product organizations are generally clear on what customer problem they are solving having done product-market-fit, they often become overwhelmed with feature backlogs and stockholders’ individualistic priorities. Product management is not program management and decision what to prioritize first should be based on what delivers max outcome. Biz-Dev-Ops multi-stakeholder collaboration and enablement is key with product organization maturity
- Product Vision - Having a good product vision is as important now as it was before. However, now it is far more important that this generation product engineers are able to relate to product mission/purpose. This acts as motivation and also attracts talent. For large companies with globally distributed teams, they need to have a mechanism to enable this on continuous basis????
- Culture is core : Product mindset and culture is core. It takes time to evolve, but that's fundamental to long term success. How is the decision making process - are teams empowered to take decisions ? Are multi-stakeholders collaborating in alignment ? I believe for good product teams customer centricity has to convert into customer problem solving obsession. Innovation in the DNA. Right skilling the product teams with continuous learning is required . Culture can't be visually seen and so Leaders must demonstrate with actions and these get imbibed in the team culture??
- Product Marketing - In today's world we cannot keep the marketing in another silo. For the value to be delivered to the customer, at the right place-time, digital marketing is a must to create the bond with the product. Data, analytics and use of martech technologies create lots of commonalities for marketing and product teams to work in alignment. Both groups need to be fully work hand-in-hand to deliver the value to the end-customer/consumer and business
These capabilities vary in product companies of different size, scale and maturity - digital-native product companies vs startups vs large companies with a legacy. They have different organizational structures and hence do not have the same challenges in realizing value from a truly Product Operating Model. Digital Native Product companies have the advantage of using digital technologies and Agile methodologies from the get-go. On the other hand, larger product companies who have not been born-digital not only have to carry silos of product management processes/technology, but also people and culture along in this transformation. New skills and competencies upskilling is required in all stages - discovery, product management, product delivery and marketing.?In my experience of working with mid to large companies product organizations, it is a multi-year transformation journey of evolution. It is essential that the journey roadmap needs to be customized to consider current maturity and organizational culture. Change Management is often the most overlooked area, and if not done well decides the ultimate adoption of 'Product Operating Model' transformation.
