Future of Product Development: From Fake Productization Saga to Truly Product-Centric Organizations

How often do we hear inspirational-motivational speeches from C-level executives, when they present at a town hall? Their reassurance about being on the same page about goals, mission, vision, alignment on strategy and execution is usually so strong! They often talk about a successful transition to becoming a true customer-centric organization and winning hearts and minds of many customers. But are they really on the same page? Is your organization truly prepared to do, what it takes, to shift towards product centricity? Is your organization willing to change it’s structure, HR norms and policies, budgeting and finance approaches?

It is unfortunate that many “let’s go products” initiatives take on the form of a fake productization saga. If the marching order is “We Must Become a Product Organization FAST”, whilst there is no true commitment to challenge organizational design, teams’ structure and traditional status quo, then we might be facing a lot of relabeling and terminology overloading, such as:

Component teams –> feature / product teams
Technical tasks –> “technical stories”
Components –> “products“
And…. “tech for tech products”

In order to properly shift from being a legacy project/program/portfolio-oriented organization to product-oriented organization and be able to effectively define product(s), your company needs to be prepared to challenge some of its own, historically “untouchable” elements: overall org design and reporting, team structure and staffing models, compensation and incentives, and of course, very importantly, funding/budgeting mechanisms.

In this session, Gene Gendel will share some ideas about what steps should be taken to properly define a product(s) and organically move towards true business agility and becoming a product-centric organization.