Thread by @lissijean

If you’re not rethinking how your business model and company could be disrupted and made better by software products, you’re not truly doing a product “transformation”.

A thread on the power of #prodmgmt 👇 /1

Over the past 7 years I’ve worked with many large enterprises which are what I call “software enabled”. That means they don’t primarily sell software for revenue.

Banks, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers, etc. /2

These companies typically were run on a traditional IT approach - the business tells tech what tools they need, and tech builds them. Tech is a Dev shop, a services org. Not strategic but reactive. /3

Flash forward 20 years and they usually have thousands of tools, no insights into how they have been used, and a massive amount of tech debt.

So they decide to “transform”. They start to adopt #agile teams, restructure, and create the product role. This is where I come in. /4

When I work with leadership to understand the outcomes of the product transformation I hear:

- streamline our products
- stop being reactive
- Lower cost of ownership
- better prioritization

Everything is cost related because IT is seen as a cost center. /5

So I ask them “if you really want to transform, how is this transformation going to disrupt your business?”

They’ll look confused. But we’re just making a new product portfolio? We’re streamlining. We are making things better for our business customers. /6

While that’s a fine way to optimize your tech teams, it’s not a true transformation.

The reason older enterprises get disrupted is because they don’t see software as a strategic lever to further or disrupt their business model. /7

They want to be more strategic with their software, but they are worried. “We can’t just stop serving our business needs to build something radically different!” No one said you had to, hence a portfolio approach to building horizon 1-3 products. /8

But usually the problem is no one in leadership saw this as a true transformation. They claim they want the product teams to be strategic but there is usually no clear strategy anywhere, not even at the business, that software could align to. /9

And the software leaders and teams are worried that no one in the org will get behind the idea of these teams changing into a strategic player because that means saying no to some requests from the business. /10

So here’s my advice, so you at least level set before you get into planning on how to build #prodmgmt teams.

Ask yourself if you are transforming or streamlining. Is our goal to lower costs or transform our business? /11

There’s a very different approach to each of those. And very different outcomes.

One will give you cost savings, the other will help defend against competitors and grow your business.

Knowing where we are all going is key to undertaking any big product transformation. /end