If your organisation finds it difficult to consistently deliver successfully, could changing to a Product-based approach help?

A Product-based approach represents a significant shift to the way organisations deliver change, the main difference is cultural. In order to enable this, companies must be willing to empower, and more importantly trust a team of individuals to do what it takes to make the right changes and adaptations that allow a product to be successful.

Adopting this model means shifting the way you measure success to outcomes as opposed to output. Less emphasis is put on what is being delivered and more focus is put on to the value derived from what is being delivered. Product teams are tasked with ensuring that the product is successful and will gear the work towards what deliverables are required in order to achieve that. It becomes less important to deliver specific items as long as what is being delivered is enabling the team to demonstrate tangible progress towards a measurable objective or goal, which should tie in with an overarching strategic business goal.

Contrast this approach with the way organisations traditionally manage change and you will see a significant difference in the governance, organisation, funding and how the outcome is measured. However, the broad objectives of both approaches will ultimately be the same. What company doesn’t want their products and offerings to be successful, popular and ultimately profitable?

So if an organisation’s objectives don’t change, why change the approach?

The main benefit of a Product-based approach is that your team’s focus will always be on what the most effective and important deliverables are. The team is empowered to make the right decisions and shift focus to what is considered to be the most valuable thing to be doing at any given time.

When you aim to achieve your objectives through a solely Project-based approach, your focus is on ensuring that you deliver a specific solution on time, within budget and to a set scope. The assumptions you make about the benefits of delivering a project can take months, sometimes years, to be assessed due to project durations. If your assumptions are correct then everything is good, if they aren’t then it’s often too late and can be costly to resolve. Even if you have the ability to alter the scope mid way through a project, this can be difficult and costly.

Shifting to a Product-based approach allows your teams to be more responsive to the needs of your customers and to adapt as required to ensure that what is being delivered now is the most relevant and important thing to be delivering at any given point. This approach also encourages reducing the size of initiatives and deliverables enabling teams to finish items quickly and to reduce waste accordingly.

Making this shift can be difficult to do.

As with everything, it’s easy to describe the benefits, but more difficult to achieve them in practise. It requires some level of patience to realise all of the benefits, but some will come quicker than others.

To be successful in a Product-based approach, you must have a highly skilled, autonomous and accountable team who, as mentioned above, are empowered to make the right decisions independently. The key is to set appropriate and most importantly measurable objectives that can be constantly reviewed. This enables the team to understand what it means to be successful and all of their work will, in turn, be geared towards ensuring this happens regardless of what they are actually delivering.

This can only happen in an organisation where the leadership trusts the approach and the people who will implement it. Without this trust, the mechanisms that support this will erode and there will be a gradual shift back to more prescriptive ways of working.

Not all work can be delivered in this way and this won’t be the right course of action in every circumstance. A Product-based delivery model is inherently Agile and this is not always the right way to go, as highlighted in a recent article by my colleague, Darren Womack, here.

It’s also important to note that Products and Projects aren’t mutually exclusive. A Product can, and sometimes should, be delivered through a series of Projects, but whether or not this is right would need to be judged on a case by case basis.

Is it right for you?

In order to determine if a Product approach is right for your organisation you must first decide if you are prepared to relinquish some of the control associated with the more prescriptive style and enable a dedicated team to make the right decisions for your product on their own. Culturally, this is difficult to do, however this will not work if the team is not empowered to make the right decisions autonomously. Benefits can be realised quickly if done right, though. If you are interested in taking this approach, assess your product portfolio and see if anything can be maintained in isolation and experiment with that. Develop meaningful metrics to measure success and shift your focus to outcomes, not simply output. Gain trust and buy in from senior leadership by starting small and demonstrating the benefits as you roll out the approach.

Given enough time, you will be able to see what does work within your organisation and you can start to shift other products to this model.