Moving from Project to Product Ownership for your Cross-Org Initiatives

How do you manage your cross-organization initiatives?

Those are some of the most significant, complex endeavors companies take on. They are often strategic bets for the organization, yet they are often very frustrating to manage.

So frustrating that these are often the reasons leaders start thinking about bringing on project managers… who:

• Apply very tight control for the whole project - tracking to committed scope and agreed upon project plan

• Spend a frustrating amount of time planning and coordinating activities

• Try to minimize change (processes such as change control and change request start appearing)

While there’s much more control, and sometimes even signs of traction towards the project plans, outcomes are still elusive.

We’ve learned a lot about project management in the last decades.

We’ve learned that when working on a complex problem, it’s essential to prepare for the unexpected. The plan becomes useless the moment you enter the ring with your opponent.

The way to improve your odds is to manage differently.

Let’s take inspiration from how we’ve been tackling this challenge in product development.

For starters, we’ve moved from managing projects to managing products - focusing on achieving outcomes and business impact while being flexible with activities and deliverables.

The cool trick is that this thinking applies even when beyond classic product development.

Your move from perpetual to subscription licensing? you can treat it as a product designed to change behaviors and deliver an impact

Your adoption of a new talent acquisition approach? yes

Moving from a focus on bespoke projects for clients to a stronger product foundation? yes

And once you start tackling your initiatives this way, you can leverage Product-oriented Initiative Ownership, which means the people who take ownership of an initiative:

• Act as a visionary for their strategic initiative.

• Own the Outcomes

• Connect to customers,

• Collaborate with a multitude of teams on finding creative and effective ways to test and deliver outcomes.

• Make critical decisions as well as decentralize when possible while providing clarity and context.

• Focus on the risks/uncertainties and create discovery and delivery plans that provide plenty of opportunity to inspect, adapt, or stop.

• Leverage influence to drive collaboration towards outcomes across multiple products and departments.

You might say they act like Professional Scrum Product Owners…