You want to build products that your customers love. And an organization that leaves a positive impact on the world.
But some days it feels like there’s a lot of motion, but little progress. What needs to change?
Melissa Perri offers a number of tips and a framework for thinking about building a product-centric organization in her book, “Escaping the Build Trap.”
“The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than the actual value those things produce.”
While execution is critical, the problem with focusing on outputs is that they might not deliver the outcomes the organization needs to be successful.
New features, activities, and reports aren’t necessarily creating value unless they address stakeholder problems, wants, and needs. And even if they do address stakeholder needs, they don’t necessarily create value for your organization or help you achieve your portfolio goals.
As leaders, we need to be cautious about what kinds of behaviors and mindsets we’re rewarding and which we’re not. We need to launch projects to build and improve products. But execution is only a portion of product work.
Perri mentions that many companies find themselves in a mode of either reacting to what stakeholders are asking for, becoming reliant on a single visionary, or swayed by technology trends. She recommends that we instead focus on becoming a product-led organization.
“Product-led companies optimize for their business outcomes, align their product strategy to these goals, and then prioritize the most effective projects that will help develop those products into sustainable drivers of growth.”
What kind of skills do you need to foster in a product-led organization?
You need people who will work with their team to define and build solutions, release them, and track the results.
But you also need people who are obsessed with finding and validating problems. People who will research the market, and how your business works, including the vision and goals of the organization. Who will help the team design solutions that serve both your customers and your organization. And tie it all together with a roadmap to communicate the plan and align the team.
Some agile product owner training will teach the mechanics of how to get an idea through a pipeline, but doesn’t often help people learn how to determine value, decide whether it makes sense to build or buy a solution, how to integrate with other partners and software, roll out the change to end users, and measure the success of products in real world. A large portion of the work is investigating questions and exploring to reduce unknown unknowns.
How should you organize to promote a product-centric mindset?
Organize around business goals if possible, but at a minimum around your organization’s value streams. Value streams are all of the steps a business follows to deliver a benefit, product, or service to your customers. Organizing this way will help you determine changes to products and systems that are in alignment with business strategy and release them faster.
How else can you help as a leader?
Strategic support
As a leader, you’re in a position to help set and communicate the strategy. Strategy explains the vision, objectives, and outcomes for specific time frames. Where do you want to be in 5-10 years? What value will be created? Which challenges are in the way of reaching that vision? What major paths will you take? How will you consider the cost of delay of changes? From there, the organization can break down the path to the vision into problems to address and solutions to build.
Communicate a strategy at the portfolio level, and encourage the support and communication of visions at the value stream and product level. It could be as simple as a 1-page document describing the problem users are facing and how the solution helps users solve that problem.
You can also help the team think about how all of the products work together to provide value to our customers. What’s unique about each of the products? What overall guidelines should be considered? What should you stop doing or building because it doesn’t serve the vision? These are all typical questions addressed during portfolio review meetings.
Process support
Besides helping your team understand where the organization is trying to go and the biggest challenges to getting there, you can enable them to address those challenges.
All levels of product owners/managers should be able to talk to end users in order to design solutions that address their needs.
Help them better understand the current state of the enterprise. That might mean creating connections, investing in knowledge management, or research.
Share what you know about the problem to help the team decide whether they need to focus on further problem exploration, solution design, or solution optimization.
And along the way help the team stay focused on challenges that are core to your value proposition while outsourcing methods, processes, and tools that are not.
Communication across the organization
Focus on creating more visibility to close the knowledge gap across your organization. One way is by supporting the creation of roadmaps that connect products to themes, goals, and success metrics.
You could also host quarterly or monthly reviews to discuss the portfolio and strategy. Along with regular check-ins to review what changes were released and what the team learned.
Aligning incentives
Consider where you’re rewarding delivery regardless of the impact of those changes. Instead, reward people for achieving outcomes, learning about customers, and experimenting with ways to address the challenges standing between you and your vision.
You can also structure your funding differently. Think of funding your portfolio like a venture capitalist would. Some ideas will be validated and ready to be scaled out, while you’ll also want to set aside money for discovering new opportunities. The way you allocate resources communicates what the organization truly values.
Taking action is critical for reaching our portfolio goals, but we need to be cautious of slipping into the build trap.
Have you been in the build trap? What was it like as a team member? As a leader?