Build Your Product Operating Model Like a Product

Alice wants her product organization to adopt a product operating model because she believes it’s the future of working. She’s been an early adopter of agile and lean startup methods and is constantly looking for better ways to work.

Bob wants their product organization to adopt a product operating model because they have an expensive problem: they were brought in to help scale a product organization. With 12 product teams working on a line or portfolio of products, there’s little consistency, little alignment to outcomes, and little predictability.

Charlie heard about a product operating model from their analyst at Gortner. Then, the partner at McLoitte they are working with suggested it might be the next big step in their organization’s transformation.

Which of these product and tech leaders will get more out of their investment in adopting a product operating model?

Alice is motivated by ambition. She is one of a rare breed of leaders whose ambition is oriented around the how, not the what. She knows that being proactive and creating a great organization will eventually affect her organization’s results. Alice is willing to invest in improvement even if it’s not directly connected to a top-of-mind, expensive problem. She’s even excited to try new things for the sake of innovating.

Bob is motivated by desire. They have a real problem to solve. For Bob, any work on ways of working needs to be tightly connected to top-of-mind problems or opportunities that affect the ability of their organization to deliver.

Charlie is motivated by status and FOMO. If everybody is investing, they will jump on board.

What should you do if you’re Alice, Bob, or Charlie? How should you approach the Product Operating Model, or any similar opportunity?

Here’s what I’d do:

• Explore real problems and see which improvement ideas could address them. This matters even, and especially, if the improvement idea first emerged because of FOMO or new shiny thing syndrome.

• Frame an outcome hypothesis. Why? Why now?

• Identify leading indicators focused on the behaviors the change will drive or enable. Avoid vanity metrics.

• Treat ways of working development as a “platform product,” applying a customer-centric approach to serve internal customers: the product organization and the ecosystem around it.

• Working with suppliers? Adopting a Product Operating Model could be a useful opportunity to move from a project mindset to a product mindset in how you engage vendors.

In other words, use a product-led mindset to develop your product operating model.