We're Zipping up into a New Operational Onesie.

4 Simple Principles to Embody Top to Bottom to Power Up your Products

Product operating models are hard to get right, and I think that’s partly because the concept itself can feel nebulous and hard to pin down. It’s easy to confuse yourself to be running POM in your organisation because you’ve just “completed” your digital transformation. But you’re still hesitating to release software quarterly, so somethings up. 

If you’re serious about shifting towards the product operating model, it’s really important to reflect honestly on how your company is delivering products today. This is something covered in Heather’s article here.

Once you know where you stand, you need to plot the right course to understand where you want to be directionally, and define a clear way of getting there. Read more about that in Maia’s article here.

All this is important because the Product Operating Model isn’t something that is embraced and activated within specific bubbles of the company, it needs to run all the way through from the top of the firm down for it to be effective.

Today, I want to continue on the mini-series by talking about a thin slice of how to execute on the POM, and keep it some simple principles.

It starts from the top

One of the most simplest, but important points Cagan writes about in Transform, is that a company should shift its focus from serving the business, towards serving the customers.

This fundamental re-prioritisation is something that needs to be embraced from the top. Note, this is not a binary switch from one side to the other, and a naive sermon to drop all internal focus. This is a call that will naturally move the company’s attention back towards that sweet intersection of desirability, feasibility and viability, and it all starts from the Mission Statement.

It’s important because it’s the compass that aligns the entire workforce and dictates the right actions to be taken. It becomes the detector that makes it obvious whether employees are objectively pursuing customer delighting games of internal career move war games.

I don’t like Elon Musk, I think he smells. However, the mission setting he’s done at Tesla is aromatic and delicious. 

Our mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. 

It’s Customer Centric. It does not talk about shareholder value, or giving noogies to the Polestar CEO. It has 1 purpose, and it’s to improve the lives of the end user.

Not to dunk on Hersey’s but theirs used to read “Undisputed marketplace leadership.”

They might as well have added “,at all cost” to the end of it and commissioned themselves a self-titled heart pumping Netflix thriller. Luckily, they’ve changed it since.

You get the point. C-suite endorsement of a customer centric culture is a must, and the mission statement could be the highest leverage elements to refine when shifting to a product-centric organisation. Make it simple, specific and customer focussed and you’re on your way.

Product-centricity starts at the top.

What’s your problem?

Alright, now the top tuna cares about exceeding customer expectations, what next?

There’s so much content out that talks about the ultimate benefit of co-located squads, tribes, crews, fellowships, brigades, scouts, and so on. There’s undoubtable benefits to working closely with team members, but this tactic is broadly pointless if the one fundamental principle is left out: The team owns the problem.

Co-location is not going to solve the distance team members feel to the success of the product when a feature is requested to be buit from someone else, somewhere else, who cooked up a magic solution and shared a 2 slide analysis deck wth you to prove it’s the right thing. It contains a screenshot of Q1 traffic visits from Adobe Analytics and a screenshot of your competitors new, exciting online tool. We need one of these. And we need it by the 19th July.

Each and every team member should be fired up and inspired to deliver something bigger and better than anything they could have come up with themselves. When a team’s responsibilities start and end at delivering it by a date, the commitment is gone and products are built with reduced passion, leading to sub-par products that slowly corrode your users experience and engagement with your company. 

The commitment comes from having skin in the game, in having crafted the solution with their own power. The team must be empowered. Don’t give them the solution, specifically craft the problem statement and let them own it. And whilst you’re there, let the teams create and own their own OKRs.

OK, Results. Show. me. The MONAYYY

OK, so teams have been graced with the freedom to set their own objectives. If you’re a big wig, you may want to influence them towards impact on bottom line, because at the end of the day,

A business is a business, and money rules. Right?

Not quite. Take off your Patagonia gilet and hear me out.

If the ultimate business goal is revenue, the product team's main metrics can’t be about revenue. This is because the primary function of OKRs is not to qualify for a bigger bonus, a promotion or personal validation. They should be used as a tool unjudgementally to indicate whether the team’s work is generating the right outcome for users. It gives clues to whether progress made is resonating with customers. 

The focus on customer centric metrics eliminates the distraction and worry for the product team. It means they can be laser focussed on building the sharpist product to solve the specific user problems that have been identified by the team to be the most important to solve.

Yes, revenue generating metrics are important within a company but do not translate into building quality products for customers. It’s self-centred and enables anti-patterns to pervade that prioritises the winning of internal games over benefitting the end users’. The natural trajectory of this is again a degradation of quality, and ironically the reduction of revenue.

Just continuously begging someone to go out with you rarely has fruitful outcomes. It’s the same principle.

Care about engagement. Care more about the actions the insights have prompted over narration of where the team fell short against arbitrary targets.

There’s one quote that stuck with me and if there is one thing you take away from this read, it’s this quote from a solid statistician:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful"

- George E. P. Box

The main utility of the KRs is to guide you through your next product iteration, it’s not a career development marker. 

Curiosity killed the competition

At the start of this article we talked about how executives need to trust the teams on the ground closer to the problem to own the problem and deliver autonomously. That can only happen if the team members on the ground have a self-fueled drive to want to solve the problem to their greatest ability.

Every framework, method and mantras in the Product world relies on one overarching personal attribute to make it work. Curiosity.

Curiosity is the overarching personal attribute that should be desired, encouraged and cultivated in a product organisation. We’re not looking to one and done a delivery. Products are living and breathing and without the paternalitic care and a desire to strive for that incremental improvement, the product withers like all the house plants I’ve tried raising. 

Are your Product people looking to take risks and test their hypothesis? Are they frequently reviewing your survey results? Does their roadmap mimic the competition or is it filled with branches of experimentation to really solve the problem the customers are having. 

If your people care, it will reflect in your product. Hire curious people.

Sum up 

I’ve left this post intentionally high level to really focus on the fundamental principles that underpin everything we do. This isn’t exhaustive but I’ve highlighted what I believe are 4 of the most salient and high leverage principles that can be adopted by companies to make a seismic shifts towards becoming a product first company.

• Leaders actively model the behaviors and mindset that puts customers needs above business needs

• Teams are given the authority, autonomy and resources to own the problem and solution space

• Teams are given the remit to establish clear, customer focussed OKRs themselves that align with the company’s product-first vision.

• Team members are people who continuously stay curious and have an innate desire to learn

Until next time.