“One of the things that we do differently is that we treat our company as a product” – Jason Fried – CEO and co-founder of 37signals (on Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz)
“Culture is a Product. Every company builds two products, one is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team….” Dharmesh Shah – Founder and CTO at HubSpot on Lenny Rachitsky‘s Podcast
What does it mean to treat your company as a product? Let’s take the perspective of a Product Operating Model.
Mindset – Approach every problem with a view to stakeholders, users, outcomes, dependencies, ownership
and value.
One concrete Company as a Product example is seeing yourself as a Steward of the employee experience (I have a client who’s a COO for all intents and purposes. He chose the title “Head of Stewardship” to emphasize this mindset).
More broadly, it means looking at any issue/initiative from the perspective of the relevant customer, which will often be internal. When setting goals using outcomes – the outcomes should be an improved experience for these customers. (e.g., improved onboarding experience for the new joiner, improved hiring experience for managers inside the organization, enhanced meetings experience for everyone)
Alignment – Organize, structure, and manage to a product model.
Think about what sort of cross-functional teams/structures are needed to work effectively on company-as-a-product challenges.
For example, who will need to be involved if we’re working on improving the hiring/onboarding experience? The Stewardship organization described above carved out a small cross-functional team involving representatives from People, IT, and a couple of hiring managers (who are customers of this product) to collaborate on the whole experience. They worked as a team and aligned to a shared OKR.
Investment – Plan and invest to products within a portfolio driven by strategy
Dharmesh’s take above hints at what you might want to do here. Your company is one of the products in your portfolio. And you need to pay careful attention to the right balance of investments in your company vs your other products. You should have a strategy for your company as a product. A strategic goal for how you want that product to look like over time. Intermediate goals for a shorter horizon.
Your company could be seen as one product or a portfolio of products (E.g. developer experience as a product, sales team experience as a product, employee experience as a product). And you need to look at the broader portfolio of these products and your actual products/services. Applying portfolio thinking will require you to make conscious investment choices in these products. Manage the flow of these investments.
Where does the Agile in this Product Operating Model come into play?
Developing Company-as-a-Product using the same techniques we use for developing Products.
- Designing teams to be self-managed and empowered (with minimal dependencies) to own the experience of their customers and have effective interactions with their stakeholders (e.g. leadership)
- Working in quick iterative cycles building increments of company-as-a-product value, testing, measuring, inspecting and adapting.
- Aligning to outcome-oriented goals, managing work using outcome-oriented smaller slices, and using evidence to steer.
- Focusing on the right amount of things. Stop Starting Start Finishing
- Leverage patterns and frameworks that work well for developing complex products in uncertain environments (e.g. Scrum…)
This Company-as-a-Product mindset applies whether you’re leading a team, team of teams, portfolio, division, company, or any other organization. I’d argue every leader does this implicitly, even if at an unconscious level. Adopting this mindset unlocks the door to leveraging patterns that help you develop this product more effectively.
At this point, we know so much about developing products effectively. Let’s leverage this knowledge and experience to build better organizations.
Some of the most successful founders have already unlocked this secret.