Once-so-often as one changes teams and organisations, we come across “product” teams that are feature-centric and more concerned with delivery. Their day-to-day activities are swamped with pitching for resources on these features and then following up till the feature is delivered. Post that, they move to the next feature. And the cycle continues. While everyone agrees on that the focus should be more outcome-centric, because of the culture & history, the thinking and resultant actions regresses to feature delivery.
As a Product leader (Dir/VP/HoP etc.), there are a few ways to transform such a product organization. And if you are joining a new role in an existing/new organization, it’s better to start this move with tiny-steps within the first 90-days.
Choose the Right Metrics to Track Progress:
Instead of focussing on a org-level top-down metric like revenue that can overwhelm a delivery-focussed team, go bottom-up. What are the key input metrics needed to move the needle on revenue? For example, Conversion rate. The goal could be to improve conversion rate from 2% to 4%. To improve the conversion rate, the product teams can come up with different product experiments. With each experiment, the impact can be measured and can indicate progress towards the goal.
Champion OKRs within the Product Organization:
OKRs or Objectives Key Results are already quite popular. If OKRs are new to an organization, then take up the ownership of getting executive alignment of instituting them. Start small, start with the product organization as a sandbox. Ensure the key principles of OKR are followed. Since there are tons of material on the Internet, would suggest just Googling up for further best-practises on OKR.
Setup Periodic Business Reviews
Institute periodic business review meetings to track progress towards the key outcome metric. Make team members present the outcome, the reasons why they succeeded/failed and their suggestions on what can be done / course-corrected. The more they present their suggestions, more they start owning the actions and the results. Ownership is the bed-rock of an outcome-focussed culture.
Recognise the Outcomes and/or Learning
Recognise the outcomes and/or learning if the outcome is not achieved. Talk about the key outcomes of the previous period in executive reviews. Talk about future product experiments in the context of the outcomes. In order to move outcomes from discussion points to being the center of day-to-day decision making, the outcome-centric approach needs to be internalised by the team members. Prioritisation decisions, trade-offs etc. need to be made keeping the key outcome in mind. All these micro-actions tend to become a habit as these are consistently practised.
