Product is the way an organization delivers and captures value. For sales teams, it can feel relatively easy to define products and customers. There is an end customer who buys the product/ service and uses that product. many times the user of the product may be different. The sales team would work hard to get to know the customer and how the products can be made better, continuously improved to make them more successful.
This is the core of organizational agility - making improvements to products, observing and measuring consumer behavior, determine whether you should continue to improve or move on to something else. the faster you learn the faster you can improve and product teams should understand this basic equation.
What if you do not work on products, say Accounts, HR, legal, It departments? Do you still make a product? Do you have customers? For an agile organization, the answer is an unequivocal yes to both the questions.
Then how do you know what is your product, have you delivered value and captured it back? In many cases, the teams in these departments can measure success by measuring its delivery af=gainst the goals or new initiatives. However, how do you measure if that was the best version of that goal or initiative? To do this we need to apply product thinking to every department initiative, goal. We should move away from an output-based mindset to a customer-centric view.
We need to reframe the work with the language of products and customers. This begins by rethinking the initiative/ solution as a problem to solve for a specific set of customers. To measure success is not the completion of work but a measurable positive change in the behavior of the customer i.e, you are working on outcomes rather than outputs. the team needs to understand the needs of the customer and deliver the most relevant solution for each customer type.
These concepts may not be common and the organization may not know where to begin. Inevitably, this type of major change requires top leadership support and understanding. training leaders and individual contributors would be a good place to start. Once the framework is understood, explore solutions and let go of ideas that solve customer's problems and share the learnings with the rest of the department.
By approaching work as a product with specific customers, giving teams problems to solve, and measuring success with outcomes rather than outputs, it would help in creating a customer-centric culture and ensure when someone buys a product from you you are always maximizing both your customers and yours.
Bring Product Thinking to Non-Product Teams
by Jeff Gothelf HBR April 07, 2020
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