Ingredients for Product Excellence
Product Culture
Product culture determines how product decisions are taken. It is about balancing between customer needs, solution capabilities and business constraints. Unbalance may lead to waste of energy in the organisation, for example:
- Too much sales-opportunity-driven: creation of bespoke, often not scalable solutions.
- Too much technology-driven: overengineering, feature-driven, high product cost, long innovation cycles.
- Too much business-achievement-driven: suboptimal decisions, unrealistic goals and expectations.
Product Toolkit
Product management skills and competence need to be in place to enable informed product decisions and plans, for example:
- Doing proper market & customer research as input to a feasible product vision.
- Thinking beyond the core product to deliver customer value (building on concepts like whole product, Doblin 10 types of innovation, Business Model Canvas).
- Partnering with the multidisciplinary organisation to create product plans and execute product creation, commercialisation and customer success.
Product Leadership
When organisations embrace working with empowered product teams to drive innovation, strong product leadership is required to ensure that product teams deliver on market opportunity and business objectives. Product teams should be able to:
- Stimulate collaboration and alignment within the organisation.
- Drive execution and ensure that problems that stand in the way of success are effectively solved.