Transformation Story - Simple Approach

Every Product Company in this VUCA World wants to stay competitive by building a digital tomorrow to be the best Product Company in the world. Recent trend is to achieve this via a product led tech-organization with agile ways of working. There are many approaches to lead this transformation. Some Organization go for Top Down Big Bang approach and some Organizations take bottom up approach to take an incremental step towards achieving this Transformation. There are innumerable case studies where the first approach fails however the later one succeeds in most of the cases.

While going for transformation with this operating model, almost every Product Company expects to drive consumer value with more speed & quality through empowered & autonomous teams. Through this article, lets discuss a high-level transformation plan and also main outcomes for the transformation of any Product Company into a product lead operating model.

As mentioned earlier it is never recommended to start the transformation suddenly rather it requires and definitive approach. In various transformation I have seen a common success pattern, however needless to mention that there may be (must be) better approaches to that as everyday new ideas/approaches coming up. I generally recommend following 4 steps approach - a) Exploration b) Enablement c) Execution and d) Extend/Excel. Now all these may not necessarily be sequential and can be run in parallel, however sometimes it depends on the volume of the transformation

·        Exploration

o  Understanding the Product Vision - SWOT Analysis – For any successful transformation any Organization needs to find out the Key Driver for the Change – What is that tipping point? For which they are supposed to do a SWOT Analysis to understand Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. Then depending on the Market Demands and Change in the Marketplace they identify the Strategic Themes which will help them to stay relevant in the marketplace. For that apart from SWOT analysis we need to carry out a Due Diligence workshop to understand the following

§ What is current state of nation?

§ What is the problem we are trying to resolve?

§ What have been the quantitative data for past few years?

§ How the marketplace has evolved over period in the same domain?

§ How did our competitors perform in recent past?

§ What is our planned future state?

§ What are current pain points?

§ What is the client/market expectation?

§ What objectives we have in mind?

§ What could be the probable solutions?

§ What would be the possible blockers?

§ What could be the probable strategy to bypass?

 o  Market and User Research – This would be immensely important to define the Product Strategy and Product Design that would result in ‘WoW’ factor in customer base. For which we need to take help of User and Market Research through Survey, Interviews, Questionnaires etc.

 o  Understanding the Customer Needs is the most critical event for getting the success and for which Triad of perspective (Usability, Feasibility and Valuability) is very important

§ Usability – Whether the Customer Base is going to use the Product?

§ Valuability – Whether the Users are going to buy the product which will build revenue for the company

§ Feasibility – Whether with the current Technical Capability that the company is having, whether we can build the product.

§ and Sustainability – Considering all above aspects are true – whether or how long the product can be sustainable in this rapidly changing marketplace 

o  Customer Centricity and Design Thinking – We must move from a Project Centric approach to a Customer Centric approach to value the stakeholders who eventually will use the product. Human touch, Empathy are key to the product success these days. Understand the customer needs, their daily pain points and how to make the experience satisfying will be instrumental for the product development. That is why Design Thinking has become key for any Product Development and using Divergent and Convergent approach in identifying Customer Pain Points (Problem Statements), Voting them to find out the major problem areas are considered essential. After finding the root cause to those problem, finding probable solution can also be done using divergent and convergent technique, with starting from finding Solution Options to narrowing it down optimum solution. We use different Design Thinking Technique to do that like Persona, Empathy Mapping, Story Mapping, Journey Mapping, Solution Selection Matrix.

o  Understanding the Top Programs and List Out the Prioritized Features – Out of several program that are identified out of the Operational Value Stream, it is very important to identify the Top Prioritized Programs and Features for which Cost of Delay can be a major factor. For prioritizing Features, value can be driven by Scope or Major Milestone. Contributor to cost of delay could be User Business Value, Time Criticality, Risk Response and Opportunity Enablement.

·        Enablement

Enablement will be Key to any Product Development Success and that would spread across all stakeholder. For which, Separate Enablement plan is to be there for all levels

o  Enablement for Team - Plan to make team aware of the approach, the methodology and more importantly about the change in mindset and way of working

o  Enablement for Business - Getting Customer Buy In is most critical and in order to achieve that, it is extremely important to bring them to the same level

o  Enablement for Leaders - Leadership change is critical for success, Leader should transform from Traditional Leadership to Servant Leadership, Participatory Leadership

o  Enablement for Scrum Masters/Product Owner - Role Based Trainings are also key to success

o  Community of Practice - It is absolutely critical to share the knowledge and challenge and use the wisdom of the crowd to learn collaboratively

o  Knowledge Management

·        Execution

o  Understand the Priority Program and Plan for Execution – Once the Features are identified from Exploration, it would be key to Prioritize those by Product Owners/Managers and share it with the Teams

o  Define MVP and Story Mapping for the Features – MVP – Minimum Viable Product or Minimum Marketable Feature can be driven either by Scope or my Milestone/Event. Based on the Feature Priorities and Key Activities Story Mapping can be drawn, that would give a visual representation of the end to end flow and when to deploy/release the priority feature/stories.

o  Establish the Continuous Delivery Pipeline – Speed and Quality are key to any Product Success these days and hence DevOps is an integral path of any Agile Product Delivery. Exploration, Integration, Build, Testing, Deployment and Release are no more sequential events anymore and hence “Continuous” word is prefixed to those to ensure ‘Faster Time to Market’ and ‘Built-in Quality’ resulting in reduction of Technical Debt. Product Delivery is moving away from “V Model’ and embracing ‘Shift Left’ approach.

o  Apply Scope driven or Timeline Driven Planning – Defining MVP is crucial from Customer perspective and Revenue Earning perspective. To deliver the Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) we need to have a Scope based planning, however for a Milestone/Event Driven development we need to plan by timeline.

o  Alignment – For a Product Delivery with multiple teams, alignment and transparency is crucial to understand the dependencies and plan beforehand to reduce the blockers during execution.

o  Iteration Planning/Execution/Continuous Improvement – This would be more on execution but for multiple teams it is extremely difficult to keep them in sync from upcoming feature, dependencies, progress and challenges perspective, It is important to evolve as program and continuously improve from both Team and Program Perspective.

·        Extend/Excel

o  Create Roadmap – It is very important to stay relevant in the marketplace for which Product must evolve over time. In order to cope up with the change in the marketplace and get the product evolving over time we need to ensure that we have an emerging roadmap. It can be both short term and long-term roadmap. Short Term roadmaps will be more detailed and ready for execution/implementation, however long-term roadmaps will still be vision, emerging and yet to evolve with details. Both have immense contribution on the sustainability in long term perspective.

o  Continuously Prioritize the Roadmap based on Market and User Mindset Change – It should be a consistent approach to continuously explore user and market demand and analyze those with Customer Centricity mindset to come up with new Features. Prioritizing the Features considering the VUCA world is extremely essential and sometimes it is necessary to reprioritize to ensure “Doing the Right Thing” for the user which is in line with Agile Manifesto Principle # Simplicity – The Art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

o  Replicate the Success – Transformation is a journey and may not be achieved overnight. Instead of a big bang approach we must take this also in incremental way. Identifying a Pilot (Low hanging fruit) to demonstrate a quick win (Quantitative measurement/ Product Success is the key) followed by Continuous innovation. Once we see the benefit, the same model can be replicated with continuous improvement from the lessons learnt of the past execution (Retrospective).

o  Measure and Grow – This is critical for any Product Success to check the hypothesis of the MVP in regular interval and take a decision to carry on with the same (Persevere) or Find a new way (or pursue with other solution) to take it forward (Pivot). For which it is important to measure the outcomes quantitatively and understanding the trend. Also, we need to understand the Enterprise/Business Agility maturity in regular interval.

o  Maturity Assessment – This is also important to understand the Team, Scrum Master, Product Owner and Leadership maturity whether team is only “Doing Agile” or over a period of time they are eventually evolving as “Being Agile” Team. It is also important to check the Process Maturity to find out the way to “Get Better”. Leader should also change in this transformation otherwise they may eventually appear as big impediments.

o  Career Path - For any Organization to transform, new emerging roles to be introduced and when those new roles will be introduced we need to be transparent on the career roadmap on those roles so that the new evangelists will feel safe in taking up the emerging roles than sticking to tradition roles.

o  Dynamic Funding and Portfolio Management – Apart from the execution part there should be continuous monitoring and governance from the executive/Portfolio level and to fund the Portfolio/Programs as needed.

Stakeholders

For a Successful product Execution Different Stakeholder Involvement is needed. But the Organization structuring may vary depending on the scale of the Product Development. However, in every level there would be following stakeholder participation needed.

·        Team Level – Standard Scrum Roles – Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team

·        Program Level – Product Management Team (Client Business and IT), Program Level Facilitation (Servant Leadership), Shared Services and Integration/System Team

·        Involvement of other Organization Enablers – HR, Security, Marketing, Operations, Infrastructure, Project/Program Management

·        Sponsor Team

And other roles if there are further levels required.

Timeline

For successful transformation, it takes place in Iterative way and that is why timeline may vary, based on size, nature of engagement, number of parallel teams/programs, Level of engagement of the Business and Product Team.

Please feel free to share thoughts.

Subhabrata Pal

Senior Enterprise Agile Coach

[email protected]