Many have witnessed failed transformations, but few have witnessed true successes.
Moving to the product operating model is a transformation. At the end, it's about consistently creating technology-powered solutions that your customers love, yet work for your business. It's about delivering real results. But what do you change exactly?
You change how you build. Products are managed as an ongoing effort - improving every week until it's decided to sunset it. You do frequent, small releases so you know that it's working and how it's being used.
You change how you solve problems. Empowered product teams are given problems to solve and outcomes to achieve instead of a list of prioritized features, projects and perceived solutions decided by various stakeholders.
You change how you decide which problems to solve. A strong product company has a compelling product vision and insight-based product strategy identifying the most critical problems that need to be solved to deliver on the business objectives. Your strategy cannot be to serve as many business stakeholders as possible.
Pushing the decisions and responsibilities for finding the best solution to the problem down to the relevant product team, and then holding that team accountable for the results also drives the need for new product core competencies (that normally takes years to learn).
Unless you are willing to establish these new competencies, your transformation hopes will likely end here.
For the product team together with the product manager to discover and deliver effective solutions, it is absolutely critical that they have direct access to:
- Users and customers,
- Product data,
- Business stakeholders and
- Engineers (the tech lead as a minimum).
Fight any attempt to place a well-meaning person or cumbersome process between the product manager and these constituencies.
An honest and accurate assessment of the organization’s current situation is essential to any plan to successfully transform. Be realistic, talk to all levels and look for evidence.
Start with pilot teams volunteering to be on the leading edge of these changes. Develop the skills of the product teams (bottom up) and the skills of the product leaders (top down). Ensure your CEO supports and is a champion of the change.
Transformation is a long game, and for that reasons it helps to have some quick wins. It could simply be a team that has never visited users starts doing do and shares it experiences and insights.
Constantly beat the drum, evangelize and show everyone the progress being made.
"Transformed - Moving to the product operating model" by Marty Cagan.
