A product-centric future: assessing your organisation
A product-centric future: assessing your organisation
Understand and assess how your organisation currently delivers value through products and identify your most pressing challenge to focus on first
This is the first in a series of articles based on the combined experiences of Product Managers and Strategists working in a variety of organisations, and designed to help product leaders take the first steps towards a product-led model in their organisation.
Introduction
When I started out in product, organisations were largely going through agile transformations in an attempt to enhance their flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs. However there is a growing recognition that merely adopting agile practices is not enough and many organisations are now shifting towards product organisation (“Product Org”) transformation, which goes beyond agile methodologies to fundamentally restructure organisations in order to better develop and manage products. This transformation involves aligning teams around specific products or product lines, empowering cross-functional teams with end-to-end ownership and accountability. It requires a cultural shift towards a product-centric mindset, where teams are focused on delivering customer and business value through continuous learning and innovation.
We started Product Breaks because we know from experience that Product theory starts to break down in practice in most organisations (often because they haven’t gone far enough with a product org transformation). Where do you start if you’re not a senior exec with the kind of influence to just decide to start a full Product Org transformation? From experience, even taking the first few steps towards a more product-led model can make a big impact and can also start to shift hearts and minds in the right direction for a bigger organisational change.
Capturing your existing product development lifecycle
Visualising workflows is a main principle of Kanban, and it can help to highlight issues/bottlenecks and potential productivity improvements. This is often applied to development work (to do, in progress, done), but can also be used to map out how value flows in an organisation from the identification of opportunities, through prioritisation to actually being a built feature. Ideally this workflow is a cycle, and we are continuously learning from what has been released and feed this back into new opportunities.
Mapping out your organisation’s product development cycle
Use a whiteboarding tool to map out the specifics of how each of these stages in the process happens in your organisation. Don’t worry about making it look great, just focus on capturing the information
If you’re not embedded within the product/delivery team and don’t have first hand experience of what this process looks like on the ground, go and speak to them. There is often a difference between what we think a process is like and what it actually looks like on the ground.. You might also need to speak to related teams, such as analytics teams, to get a full understanding of the process
Capture data alongside the process map about pain points, bottlenecks & challenges in delivering outcomes/value (there are some suggested questions below)
Example questions to ask your teams:
Identify opportunities
Where do our requirements come from? Stakeholder demands, customer research, insights? What is the approximate split between these?
How frequently do we speak to customers?
Prioritisation
How many items are in the backlog? How long have they been there?
What is the ratio of tech debt & housekeeping tasks to development of new, value-adding features?
Delivery
What data do you have on how well your product development process is working?
How are you performing against DORA metrics? DORA metrics are a way of assessing software delivery and operations performance against others in your industry https://dora.dev/quickcheck/
Do you collect any other data around team health (e.g. employee net Promoter Score (eNPS) or any metrics from the Spotify health check or similar?)
Learning
What data do you collect on how well a new feature performs versus the intended result?
Are you capturing metrics around customer satisfaction?
Are you evaluating when to sunset features? (this is a good indication of whether you are continuous measuring the value of features)
Common challenges/anti-patterns
At the end of this process, you should be able to identify where there are potential opportunities for improvement in your product development process.
Across many organisations we have worked with we see common anti-patterns. How many of these apply to your organisation?
Lack of continuous discovery to feed into identification. Requirements/features handed down by business stakeholders and not informed by customer research, insights or the overall strategy. Lots of bitty ‘projects’ and BAU/housekeeping tasks
Opportunity identification & prioritisation not aligned to a clear vision
A lack of a clear vision and associated & linked objectives meaning that prioritisation can be hard to do, or just doesn’t prioritise the most valuable activities to drive the business forward
Lack of learning from delivered features
Features are delivered and ‘forgotten’ about - they are ticked off as a completed deliverable but not inspected for whether or not they actually drive the intended customer and business outcomes.
This anti-pattern can be particularly dangerous when combined with an ‘MVP’ mindset, as features are often slimmed down during the build phase in order to release quickly, but never iterated on to ensure they deliver the value they were originally designed to. (We could probably write an entire article on this - watch this space!)
Understanding your organisation as a whole
The above exercise focuses on the product development process, but this doesn’t happen in a vacuum and, whilst making incremental improvements to your product approach, it’s worth thinking about what kind of product organisation you are looking to be. Not all will need/want/be able to become truly product led, however you should make a conscious choice that takes into account the wider leadership team.
In order to get a sense of where your particular organisation should focus, you can conduct an assessment across key areas: Vision, People, Process, Technology and Data. - assigning a rating across each on a scale of ‘Chaotic → Reactive → Stable → Proactive’, using the guide below as an aid.
Based on your learnings from the interviews and mapping exercise above, complete the assessment yourself, but also get someone else in the organisation (ideally a member of the exec team) to fill in the assessment themselves separately and then compare them. Where do they line up? Where are there discrepancies and why? You can use the data and evidence you have gathered to begin a conversation with the exec about the need for change.
What’s next?
This exercise should hopefully give you some guidance on where to start with moving towards a more product-centric model. If there is a particular worst-performing area then focus there to begin with. In our experience Vision is often the crux and if there are multiple poorly performing areas then a clear vision can lay great foundations for improvements across other areas (particularly People).
We’ll be publishing subsequent articles to follow up from these assessment exercises and we’d love to get your input into what you’d like to see. Please complete our very short and completely anonymous survey to let us know the results of your assessment and help us prioritise what to write about next!
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