Transformed: A Product Manager's View
Our take on how you can help your organisation to change how it works for the better
Like much of the product world over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading Marty Cagan’s new book, Transformed. In it, Cagan and the SVPG team set out how organisations can move to a product operating model, which enables them to serve their users effectively in a world of changing technologies and new competition.
As product managers, we’re usually spearheading transformation in our organisations. The ways of working we rely on break with tradition, and require changes in attitudes and habits for the teams we work with closely. For our products to have lasting impact, we need these teams to work in user-centred ways that prioritise delivering value. But adding ‘support organisational transformation’ to your already long and gnarly to-do list can feel overwhelming, and sometimes it’s hard to know how to have the most impact.
In this article I set out four tips I’ve found helpful when thinking about how to create lasting transformational change in an organisation.
Embed principles over frameworks
My first tip builds on the SVPG tenet of ‘principles over process’. In the working world, and especially in product, we have a myriad of frameworks to draw on. These frameworks help us prioritise our work, organise our work, estimate how long our work will take… I could go on. Frameworks are nice because they’re clear and unambiguous. There are instructions that help us know when and how to use them.
The downside of this is that teams looking to transform often latch on to frameworks without fully understanding the principles that underpin them. This means that key elements of working in a product-oriented way, such as delivering value regularly through shipping code, are not in place. A team becomes amazing at ‘working in kanban’, but only releases update to their product every six months.
To avoid this ‘fake transformation’ situation, my advice is to choose the two or three most important principles that your organisation needs to understand. These could range from ‘prioritise collaboration between engineer, product and design’, to ‘focus on measured outcomes over output’. They will change depending on the stage your organisation is at in its transformation and the particular challenges it is facing.
Repeat these principles at every opportunity, demonstrate them in your own team’s work, and coach people outside your team to follow them. This takes more effort than sharing some slides about a framework, but it will have a more lasting impact on your transformation efforts.
Keep it simple (and in plain English)
Alongside frameworks, another thing we see lots of in the product world is jargon. This can be intimidating for teams who aren’t familiar with certain words or phrases, and its use can cause them to disengage from the transformation process. What’s more, much of the jargon is unnecessary. By forcing yourself to explain what you’re trying to achieve in plain English, you can provide clarity and help teams to buy into what you’re doing.
For example, a big part of our role as product people is to manage risk and deliver value as quickly as possible, often by identifying the MVP or ‘thin slice’ of delivery. Getting lost in debates about what a true MVP is or what we mean by ‘a thin slice’ actually distracts from the question that we’re ultimately asking: ‘what’s the minimum we can deliver to learn?’ This question can be much more easily understood, and explains what we’re actually trying to do. (Note: this isn’t an argument against the phrase MVP, it’s just a challenge to make sure we’re always communicating as clearly as we can.)
Start small
As PMs, we rarely have the remit to completely redesign an org structure and to instruct teams to immediately start working in a different way. What is in our power, however, is to identify use cases that have a wider reach than just our team where we can apply product operating model principles and then let the resulting outcomes persuade people of the approach.
For example, a key principle of the product operating model is for engineers, product and design to collaborate to solve user and business problems. Where you’re working with separate engineering and product teams, this often doesn’t happen. You could try taking a problem you need to solve, and inviting the tech team and other stakeholders to be involved from the outset, from articulating the problem statement to researching with users. Explain that you’re trying something different and that you’ll collect feedback on how they find it. Based on what we know about working in motivated and fulfilled teams, people should enjoy the opportunity to be involved earlier, and it should mean you make faster progress towards finding a solution.
By focusing on a specific, isolated problem, you’ll start to prove why a product operating model is worth moving to, using results rather than rhetoric.
Understand constraints
A common anti-pattern of (particularly agile) transformations is that teams working “in the old way” feel that their needs aren’t being understood and so disengage from the process, leading to factions and sides. It’s important to understand the different perspectives of the teams you want to transform, and help them meet unavoidable constraints.
For example, a common misconception of agile methodology is it means you can wave goodbye to committing to timelines and plans. For teams such as finance, who have hard deadlines as part of the work, as well as teams with a dependency on your team's work, this is beyond frustrating. To make transformation land, you need to identify constraints like these and show how they can be met in a product operating model. Where a team has a genuine and intractable deadline constraint, you can use the discovery techniques we rely on as PMs and close collaboration with your engineers to explore a design together and make what SVPG terms ‘high integrity commitments’ - time estimations you are confident in.
Identifying what worries a team about the transformed way of working and showing how you can address that worry in the new world will be key to gaining buy-in and changing behaviour.
The bottom line
Organisational transformation is hard, and it requires both a top-down and bottom-up approach. The CEO or business leader has to absolutely believe in and advocate for transformation, and the teams have to buy-in to and live the new ways of working. Hopefully these tips are useful when you’re thinking about how you as a product manager can impact and support transformation.