Product-Centric Business Agility

Technology is rapidly revolutionizing the world around us and the rules of engagement. So leaders should adjust their ways of working, operating models, and organizational cultures to catch up with technology-enabled transformation.

Faced with uncertainty, organizations now need their leaders to be agile, future-focused, and resilient. And to benefit from this digital transformation, businesses should shift mindsets and current operating models.

Product centricity can allow businesses to deliver consistently and effectively, targeting customer needs. However, this model needs skills, the right mindset, and culture to ensure that organizations attain the desired results.

Being a product-centric business doesn’t mean replacing the existing process; instead, it just requires a rewiring of how work is done and delivered.

What is Product-Centricity?

Product centricity is a business model that allows the company to focus on the internal capabilities for developing and delivery of product. As a result, the organization puts laser focused effort into developing new product and advancing existing products based on market demand from user usage and feedback.

If the product performs incredibly well, the organization can decide to launch it in a new market segment, region or country. The company also invests in upgrading the quality of better-performing products. However, the organization kills the under performing products and deploys resources and time to the high-performing products.  This means unequivocally, continuous evaluation of initiatives that are in-progress for determining if the initiatives are valuable and meeting problem solving hypotheses tests.

Steve Jobs once said, “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Hence, the product-centric principle works on introducing products customers have not yet realized. It’s a risk-taking model where the organization believes the customer will need a new product.  The company invests in accelerated ways to deliver the product faster to consumers for feedback and validation.

Benefits of Product-Centric Business Approach

Product centricity comes with tons of benefits, including:

Building Reputation

Product quality affects an organization’s purchasing decision and its profitability. Quality describes the capability of a product to satisfy the user. High-performing products will leave a customer happy, and they’ll recommend them to family and friends.

Word-of-mouth recommendation is a persuasive form of advertising, which is also inexpensive. So focusing on quality will bring positive reviews and recommendations.

Even though the product-centric approach gears off customers’ needs and requirements, the company ensures the products are high quality. Therefore, it results in fewer returns and customer complaints. And the more the company pleases clients, the more likely they will get repeat purchases.

More so, there is a strong positive association between profitability and quality. Having fewer field failures and defects leads to lower production and service costs.

Customer Loyalty

Customers who get good-quality products will never leave your brand. Therefore, you should offer continuous value to the clients and prospects.

Focused Approach

Product centricity means the business focuses solely on building the product. The strategy is explicit, put all effort and resources into creating the best-in-class products.

Factors That Drive a Product-Centric Business

Product centricity allows the organization to rapidly innovate because they focus on strategic differentiation of the product and evolving requirements.

Nevertheless, leaders need more than eagerness and motivation for agile transformation. Besides, a product-centric business requires the right culture, effective investment models, new skill sets, and roles.

The organization must navigate across factors elements to ease into a products-centric shift. These factors include:

1.     Changing the Mindset

Rewiring the organization for a product shift model requires effort, time, resources, and a change in mindset. However, it ensures agile transformation is not met with organizational and cultural resistance.

However, this journey can be unnerving because it means changing the old ways of working, systems, and processes. Some organizational structures need to be overhauled and supported from the top.

The organization can develop the understanding and flexibility for a successful product-driven mindset. It can happen in several ways, including

Focus from Performance to Value

Focusing on the right metric helps your team prioritize value. Some leaders might still insist on measuring the on-budget or on-time delivery or status of a product, forgetting about inherent value. A product-driven mindset would consider factors like better customer engagement, enhanced business agility, and improved market share.

Keep the team focused on creating products that deliver incredible business value rather than keeping an eye on new releases and features.

Outline Clear Goals

Product goals should be business-oriented, simple, and clear. Although it’s tempting to build products based on modern technologies, company structures, and capabilities, it can result in dependency gridlock.

Empower Teams in Decision-Making Processes

Empowering your team and engaging them in decision-making is a surefire way to make an efficient product-centricity shift. Gone are the days when executive leadership should be accustomed to predetermine every company’s move.

In a successful product-based model, the executives should set clear goals and fully empower the product team to adjust and define scope. In addition, organizational leadership is responsible for eliminating hindrances and cultivating skills to deliver value.

Identify Skills

Managers often face problems when allocating work. But you will realize some employees are better skilled at certain tasks. And as you contemplate on skills, also check the availability of the staff.

Then clearly define the roles of the product team based on the needs of the new items. Again, this is a great approach rather than trying to fix the existing team to fit into the new model.

Alternatively, you can plan to reskill your team to deliver these capabilities. You may have less experienced members in your team. And giving them less critical jobs will not enhance their personal development.

So, giving them extra tasks can help them become competent members of your project. You can also encourage them to upskill to meet the qualifications of a product team.

Direct Engagement with Customers

With the complexity of a product life cycle, some products might miss the light of the day. This is often caused by the fear or unwillingness to engage customers. With a product-driven model, experience and customers are at the center stage of the structure. Ownership is about deep knowledge and intimate understanding of the customer.

Well-performing organizations are more likely to engage clients in product development.

Change Leadership Behaviors

Success is no longer determined by the budget or team size, nor is it defined by finishing projects timely. Instead, when it comes to the product-centric model, leaders get rewarded for attaining results.

Small teams created around products yield exemplary results compared to command-and-control hierarchies. Leaders should ensure clarity of purpose, empower teams and cultivate skills across the workforce.

2.     Changing Organizational Roles and Culture

Pushing back against corporate antibodies and adjusting the mindset is important, but changing the culture and talent skill set is indispensable towards product centricity. But it doesn’t mean putting a new label on old structures and roles.

The product shift requires an in-depth evaluation of current skills, how financial resources are allocated, and working towards a new organizational setup.

Focus on Learning and Incentives

Learning is a critical element in any organization. Allow your team to make bold decisions and don’t retribution or blame. An incentive, a reward, or recognition program can detect product failures early. This leads to less rework, returns, customer disappointments, and reduced costs.

Organizations should appreciate the unsuccessful attempts and even reward employees for being bold and ideating. Therefore, it’s important to reward these desired behaviors in leadership readouts and meetings.

Encourage Both Technical and Soft Skills

It’s normal for a leader to push employees to acquire technical skills. But organizational leaders are progressively looking for people with soft skills, such as creativity, emotional intelligence, and cognitive flexibility. Business knowledge and great interpersonal skills are increasingly becoming critical.

Emphasize Continuous Improvement

Constantly improving how work is done will motivate the teams to focus more on products. Automation and deployment of AI can boost performance and enhance efficiency. So employees will have ample time for better governance, creativity, and improvements.

Successful teams collaborate, align, and eliminate internal barriers to create value.

Leaders Need Technical Savviness

Today, organizational decision-makers require technical savviness and acumen. This ensures they can solve technical issues where business needs to create value. As the systems become sophisticated, so should be the business leaders.

More so, new roles are being created daily to support various projects. For example, being an IT graduate is just a small part of a technology team. In addition, there are roles like chief transformation officer and chief digital officer.

Therefore, leaders should continuously need technical acumen to steer teams towards product centricity.

Encourage Distributed Decision Making

From top to bottom, empowering employees to make decisions pays off in great responsiveness and agility. Unfortunately, traditional company models include rigid hierarchies that determine how workflows. These structures do not encourage creativity and decision-making among employees of all levels.

In a product-centric model, the structure should shift from control to entrusting teams to make decisions. The best decisions can sometimes come from low-level workers. This way, teams can be held responsible for their choices and the value created.

When teams use their strengths, they become more productive since they feel empowered. And a better understanding of your team will help you lead them effectively. So invest in development and training to boost their knowledge.

Open the Lines of Communication

Nitpicking and hovering create a culture of mistrust. Although your team needs your availability, it doesn’t mean you micromanage them. Instead, you need to delegate, which creates an impression that you have confidence in employees.

When questions come up, first ask team members about their ideas instead of providing your ways of doing things. More so, ensure you’re proactive with positive feedback. Set up regular meetings to check and enquire about progress.

Besides, be an encouraging mentor and walk the talk. Create a culture where product team members feel valued and respected. Ask team members about their career goals and offer strength-based tasks.

Mitigate conflicts, offer advice, and be an encourager.

Stakeholder Accountability

One of the common reasons the product shift model fails in businesses is that there is a lack of engagement and commitment, and organizations are not held accountable. Therefore, the product shift model should clearly define new interactions, decision flow, roles, and accountabilities.

3.     Fitting in a Hybrid World

Technology evolution is rapidly changing how organizations operate. Although most businesses are still in the early stages of transformation, others have developed agile strategies to fit in a technology environment.

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming every facet of business across all industries. Organizational leaders prioritize harnessing technology to speed time to market, foster innovation, and boost product quality. CEOs across sectors have demonstrated that velocity and agility can beat scale.

Technology Investment

Every organization tracks financial metrics, including market share, profitability, ROI, revenue, and margins. Informed investment in technology will impact every metric, either positively or negatively. In a product-based model, leaders can use technology to understand the company’s risks and how to navigate in a competitive environment.

Technology leaders can continuously invest in security, reliability, and efficiency. They can also choose a risky but rewarding path of exploring new solutions and technologies. Teams can ultimately undertake roles with bigger influence and scope with good investment plans.

Evaluate Performance Based on Team Goals

Conventional IT structures have a delineation between teams and are built on pillars of competency. However, a product-centric model ensures there is a collaboration between and among groups. Moreover, the collaborative teams are held liable for completing tasks and business outcomes.

Use Architecture to encourage Collaboration and Consistency

Reimagine architecture as the organizational flexibility to technology deployment, asset, and innovation. A digital blueprint is crucial when implementing product centricity as it brings in collaboration and consistency. In a hybrid environment, teams should communicate consistently to avoid gridlocks in enterprise systems.

Business architecture should create systems where sharing practices among product teams is seamless. It’s responsible for ensuring the agility, infrastructure, and modularity that helps products flourish.

Wrapping Up

It’s important to communicate and define a clear purpose and goals for a product-centric model. Having clarity helps the team stay on track and better prioritize. In addition, eliminating top-down constraints helps leaders adopt swift working plans that empower cross-functional teams.

As the organization plans for a product-driven approach, it’s advisable to set up the right competencies and foundation to scale. Then, start small iron out all barriers and kinks before making a shift. This will help the company releases subsequent products with confidence and speed.

A series of cultural and structural adjustments will make the shift sustainable. Although it won’t happen overnight, streamlining ways of working and restructuring the organization is a surefire way of a successful product shift approach.