Product Development - A Primer for CxOs

Product development thrives in an organization geared for Product Thinking. Else, the product development becomes a project governed by schedules & resource management, rather than being governed by MVPs, Product Backlog and Value delivered. Steven Sinofsky talks about impact of organization structures on Product in this blog. This Product Thinking must be adopted at all levels, including CxO. This is different than being hands-on with Product Development (which in itself is a topic of discussion). Role of a Product Manager (different than a Product Owner) becomes important and this article by Josh Elman is the right starting point for anyone wanting to understand Product Management. 

Effective Product Development

Product Managers (ProMa) are the keepers of the vision and are expected to keep the developers, support, operations, marketing, sales, people champions and recruitment true to vision. This is a large responsibility and often leads to personal time management crunch & lots of meetings. Brandon Chu blogs about applying right leverage as ProMa is an inspirational piece on what to focus on. 

Product Thinking

As organisations move from being IT to a Product Organization, one this they need to bring in is the Product Mindset, they need to manage the change very well. Seeing Products as way to deliver value to customers rather than a item of sale can help management with product thinking. Thinking of a Product as a whole entity like psychologist may do with a human and not as sub-systems and codes like a surgeon may see a human, does help developers and project managers start on path of Product Thinking.

Product Development How-To

Product Development is a well researched flow with some well documented methodologies. And of course, there is always room for dissatisfaction that precedes any innovation. While on methodologies, Marek Kirejczyk talks aboutHype Driven Development (everyone loves that latest hyped up tech/tools) and how to move away from it. There are many articles geared towards CxO on latest tech hype. Like this Insights article by Jim Highsmith and Neal Ford onMicroservices. by This 4-part Illustrated Guide to Product Development by Ben Einstein is a must see!

Thanks

With inputs from fellow ThoughtWorkers, Kartik Kannan, Kartik Rajan, Ramani Siva Prakash and Sachin Sapre.

Earlier published on my blog ddiinnxxx.com.