Pivoting to the product-model
“In product development, some organizations are like dinosaurs, they are meant to go extinct, while some are innovative and empower their teams to look at problems and opportunities using discovery techniques (product discovery), not just build solutions and jump to delivery. To become product-led however, requires companies to adopt a product management mindset, which involves fully understanding the customer and the customer journey.”
Marty Cagan - Why do they keep hiring product owners to be product managers?!
Pivoting your company to become product-led will absolutely not happen overnight.
The user-centric product mindset needs to become your culture and to be fully embedded across all teams, not just the product team (assuming that you have one).
The whole organisation needs to live and breathe it. You need what Marty Cagan calls ‘ongoing evangelism.’
That means a full change management strategy of communication, training, coaching, embedding and reinforcement from leadership and change agents until it becomes part of your company’s DNA.
I’ve outlined a few practical steps that you can take to orient your organisation or business towards being user-centric and product-led.
These are centred around people and ways of working.
Process
Create a product vision
“Some companies refer to the product vision as their “North Star”—in the sense that no matter what product team you’re on, and whatever specific problem you’re trying to solve, you always know how your piece contributes to the more meaningful whole.” Marty Cagan, SPVG, Product Leadership is Hard
The product vision should be concise and inspiring, capturing the essence of the product and what it aims to achieve. It should also be customer-focused, reflecting the needs and preferences of the target audience.
Once the product vision is established, it should be communicated clearly and frequently to all team members, helping to align everyone's efforts around a shared goal.
Secure leadership buy-in
Leadership buy-in is crucial for the success of a product-led growth strategy because it requires a fundamental shift in mindset and culture within an organisation.
You need leaders to help hold ground against stakeholder requests for feature changes or developments that go against the product-led, user-centric model.
You also need leadership to help set the new vision and encourage the new approach across teams and departments.
The leadership team is intrinsic to communicating this new mindset. They will have to set the tone around the importance of prioritising the user experience. They also need to provide access to the necessary resources to enable cross-functional collaboration and experimentation.
“This requires an ongoing crusade of evangelizing—in recruiting, onboarding, weekly 1:1 coaching, all-hands meetings, team lunches, board meetings, customer briefings, and everything in between.” Marty Cagan, SPVG, Product Leadership is Hard
Product leadership
Vital to ensuring this new mindset sticks is in empowering product leaders to be better managers, and coaches and to set a good product vision and product strategy.
They also need to decide whether they will lead by “command and control” or just offer the product team “strategic context” so they can make good decisions themselves.
“Some of the strategic context comes from the most senior leaders of the company, such as the purpose of the business (the mission), and the critical business objectives for the year, but the majority of the strategic context comes from the product leadership: the product vision and principles, the team topology, the product strategy and the specific team objectives.”Marty Cagan, SPVG, Product Leadership is Hard
Find and use change agents
It’s not enough to simply have pressure from above. You need to nominate change agents within your company who can live and breathe this new mindset. Their primary role is to help motivate and educate other employees.
Choose employees who seem the most excited by the concept, and also with an aptitude for coaching others.
Create a comms plan
You need to be able to articulate your vision in clear and timely communications.
Part of my work as an external consultant is helping communicate the vision to teams and usually, teams that don’t work on the product side.
Actively build and empower cross-functional teams
Being product-led requires collaboration across departments and teams. You need to empower cross-functional teams to work together to create products that meet customer needs. But don’t just throw these teams together.
You need to help them work together and break down siloes.
Give them access to tools that make that easier, like Miro or Slack.
You also need to help them speak a common language.
I believe the key to that lies in teaching storytelling skills.
With the cross-functional teams that I train to become product led, I give them exercises in presenting their disciplines to each other using storytelling techniques. This helps them think about how they deliver their findings, make sense of data, and convey their message to a wider audience.
Being able to speak and understand what other teams are saying means people can work better together, find common ground and build stronger products.
You also need to empower them to think outside the box and come up with new ideas. This can be done with collaborative workshops and improving cross-team conversations.
“a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.”
― Marty Cagan, INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Process
Making discovery part of the process
How much do you really understand about your customer’s journey, about how they think about you, how they find you, how they interact with your product and their pain points? Without that knowledge, you can’t understand what to improve or why? Without that core foundation, it is almost impossible to develop a product-led mindset.
To fully understand your customer’s journey you need to undertake some form of empathy mapping or customer journey mapping.
This will require a deep dive into every touchpoint your customer has. But you need to ensure your teams understand how to gather this information, how to undertake a customer journey map and how to empathise with the customer.
Sending people off to ask; “What do you think of this product” is never going to get you the insights you need. You need professionally run focus groups or telephone interviews to gather accurate data.
Stakeholders across the business should also be able to give their input to build up a complete picture.
Understand, interpret, package and disseminate your data
When I parachute into companies, I tend to find them either not applying data or feeling entirely swamped by their data. Either because they don’t know how to extract insight from it, or they are asking the wrong questions.
You need experienced trained people to collate effective data and be able to interpret that data so it can be accessed and utilised by all.
“Ultimately, digital transformation isn’t a matter of purchasing a 1,000-user license for a popular business intelligence or data visualization tool and encouraging employees to use it, nor is it a matter of giving an analytics team free rein to do whatever it wishes in a silo. It’s a matter of identifying each team’s unmet needs, developing analytics point solutions that address these needs, abstracting these solutions into analytics products that can be used to address additional needs down the line, and packaging these products in a way that drives adoption by stakeholders across the organization.”
Create a roadmap for continuous improvement
Once you understand the customer journey, you’ve analysed the data, you have the evidence you need to create an effective roadmap.
A basic product roadmap outlines the features and initiatives that the team plans to deliver over a certain period.
Now, because you u have a wealth of data and an understanding of the outcomes, you will be able to prioritise your roadmap easily.
But this roadmap should still be flexible and adaptable. Your team should be able to respond to changing customer needs and market conditions. Regularly reviewing and updating the roadmap can help ensure that the team is focused on delivering the most value to customers and the business.
Iterate based on customer /stakeholder feedback
Unfortunately nothing stays still in the product-led model. Analysis last year, may no longer be relevant next month.
Being product-led means continuously iterating on products based on customer feedback.
Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach who is passionate about helping teams develop better products argues that companies need continuous discovery.
Torres argues that continuous discovery is essential for product-led thinking to work effectively. Without it, teams risk building products that no one wants or needs, wasting time and resources in the process.
By continually engaging with customers and testing assumptions, teams can ensure that they are building products that meet real user needs, creating value for both customers and the business. But absolutely everyone on the team has to be involved in the process and actively engaged in gathering and analysing feedback
Worried that you won’t be able to help your teams evolve from their prehistoric ways into the product-led model?
I am a big believer in the power of workshops - run properly - to help bring about cultural changes and cross-team collaboration. Woven into the wider cultural strategy they can be great reinforcers of change and help solidify buy-in and adoption too.
If you’re looking to implement a product-led, user-centric mindset in your company, get in touch.
Find out more about product-led growth in these articles.
