All too often when we see an organization make the move towards products, we see an all too common mistake that we also see when these organizations are moving to Agile and/or DevOps. The immediate step that these organizations make is to completely and solely focus on creating a framework to manage the Products. Let’s be very clear, putting in a framework to manage the product and teams alone does not mean you are a product. Yes, you will need a product operating model (POM), but that means more than just creating the framework to manage the product and teams.
In addition, we also need to understand that when moving towards products, this is only one piece of the transformation. We also need to take into account the architecture around the products, business and technology synchronization, workforce and talent and how we will fund the products among other things.
Lastly, even the work of determining what your products are is often badly mismanaged by organizations. The most common practice we see organizations undertake when determining what their products are is to simply look at every application, service or data in the organization and make them products. This is not the way you go about determining what your actual products are. Instead, it involved lots of discovery and tools such as value chain analysis and value stream mapping. If you haven’t taken any of these steps, then you most likely don’t have proper products.
These are just a few of the themes we cover in the Product Learning Path.
