SELF-MANAGING TEAMS: THE SECRET TO PRODUCTIZING YOUR SERVICES

Ever wondered how to balance the demands of steering your company while actively leading and empowering your team?

Self-managed teams are inherently adaptable. Their ability to self-organize allows them to respond swiftly to changes in the market.

Given their autonomy and collective responsibility, self-managed teams are often more attuned to customer needs.

This heightened customer focus can result in better products or services and improved customer satisfaction.

According to a Harvard Business Review report , business owners spend about 20% of their time on organizational and talent issues.

If you work for 50 hours per week, that’s 10 hours.

Small business owners are more hands-on with teams, so they may spend even more time on team management.

Say – 15 hours?

And if you belong to an industry with a strong emphasis on innovation and technology you may need to spend by far the most time managing teams to stay agile and competitive.

Does it come to 20 hours per week for you?

That’s the bad news. It takes a heck of a lot of time to set up a good team that doesn’t require you to be micromanaging half of your time.

Now, here comes the good news:

As a company grows, business owners find themselves transitioning from more direct team management to a role where they lead through delegation, setting the overall vision and strategy.

So how do you make this transition from dealing with minutia to visionary and strategic work?

Watch the video to learn the pillars of setting up a productized service business with scrum and self-managing teams:

Productizing your services may seem complex, but simplicity lies at the core of our approach.

In this article, we’ll guide you through 10 essential steps to transform your services with the aid of self-managing teams, eliminating the need for extensive explanatory videos.

Productize Your Services in 10 Steps with Self-Managing Teams

These steps are designed to scale your business effectively.

1. DIGITAL LEADERSHIP SYSTEM

At the inception of your transformation, establish a digital leadership system.

Define clear accountability for each aspect of your business, from sales to project delivery.

Consider this phase as laying the foundation for your business, akin to building a house starting with a well-structured basement.

Leadership ensures seamless collaboration within your teams.

2. OFFER/DELIVERABLES

Shift your focus from what you do to what you offer clients.

Your offer comprises tangible deliverables that bring value. Clients are interested in results, such as an SEO audit report or a published SEO blog post.

Quantify these results to provide a clear understanding of what clients receive and what they are paying for.

Clients don’t care what you do, clients care about what they get. So what is the result that you take and hand over to them??

3. SALES RESPONSIBILITY

Delegate the responsibility of selling your defined offerings to your sales team.

Selling individual components can lead to chaos, and the business owner must decide on the core offerings.

Your business strategy, akin to the basement of your house, should outline precisely what you sell, including the deliverables.

4. PROJECT BACKLOG

Once a sale is made, create a project backlog for each offering.

This backlog, akin to a blueprint, details the deliverables that your team needs to produce and deliver.

This marks the transition from the sales side to your production team.

5. ROLE CLARITY

Avoid chaos within your team by establishing role clarity.

While onboarding videos are helpful, the highest leverage comes from clearly defining roles.

Identify who works in which role, creating a structured foundation for your team. This is a critical step to ensuring efficient collaboration.

6. CSM (CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER) ROLE

Empower your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to take ownership.

The CSM defines deliverables in the backlog, ensuring a clear roadmap for your team’s tasks.

If something sold isn’t precisely defined, the CSM or a business analyst can step in to provide clarity before the team commences work.

7. SCRUM IMPLEMENTATION

Implementing Scrum for your team brings significant impact. Assign a process owner who collaborates with the CSM for weekly planning.

Prioritize work items based on client-defined priorities, and ensure every deliverable has a dedicated owner within the team.

8. PROCESS OWNER ROLE

The process owner plays a crucial role in weekly planning, reviewing the backlog with the CSM.

They prioritize work items, ensuring the highest-priority deliverables make it to the next week’s Sprint backlog.

This fosters accountability and commitment within the team.

9. TEAM OWNERSHIP

Encourage team ownership by allowing members to assign themselves tasks.

During the weekly meetings , high-priority work items are self-assigned, fostering commitment and accountability.

A process owner facilitates this Scrum process, ensuring a structured approach to team management.

10. COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION

Incorporate a culture of showing, not just telling, in your team meetings.

The process owner, also acting as the Scrum Master, ensures that team members showcase their work, sharing screens and project boards.

This transparent communication fosters accountability and clarity.

Implementing these steps, with a special focus on making the Customer Success Manager the owner of your team’s backlog, sets the stage for efficient service productization.

Prioritize accountability and clarity in your processes to ensure a smooth transition to self-managing teams.

Do you want to see the full business blueprint showing you all systems and the implementation steps to sell and deliver your services more easily and a lot more profitably thanks to a productized offer, AI, automation, and a self-managing team?

Click the link below for free access to our AI-powered business blueprint.