The why and how of becoming a product-driven enterprise - Part 1

The journey of becoming a product-driven enterprise

In today's fast-paced market, companies must adopt a product-driven approach to stay ahead of the competition. This means shifting from a traditional functional structure to a more agile, entrepreneurial, and customer-focused mindset. By doing so, organizations can accelerate time to value, satisfy customers early, test innovative ideas quickly, save costs, and focus on outcomes. In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits of becoming product-driven, the role of product managers, overcoming functional silos, and successful examples of product-driven organizations.

Reaping the benefits of a product-driven mindset

Even if they might not actually be building products, there are some eminent reasons why organizations should be product-driven: faster value realization, improved responsiveness, a customer-centric approach, innovation, cost savings, and higher profits.

Let’s look a bit closer at the benefits.

• Faster value realization: By eliminating dependencies and having everything needed for successful product delivery under control, organizations can accelerate the time to market and realize value at lightning speed.
• Improved responsiveness: A product-driven approach enables companies to react promptly to market changes and customer needs. This agility helps organizations to stay ahead of the competition and adapt to new challenges or opportunities.
• Customer-centric approach: A product-driven approach prioritizes customer needs and satisfaction, leading to a deep understanding of customer behavior and preferences. This understanding helps organizations design and deliver better products that can meet customer needs, resulting in increased customer loyalty and retention.
• Innovation: A product-driven approach enables organizations to test innovative ideas quickly and efficiently. This testing allows companies to validate ideas, identify flaws, and make improvements early in development, resulting in higher-quality products that meet customer needs.
• Cost savings: A product-driven approach can save organizations money by avoiding big upfront investments in analyzing things. Focusing on outcomes and avoiding waste helps companies stay lean, reduce costs, and make more informed decisions.
• Higher profits: By focusing on outcomes and changing user behavior, organizations can help customers solve problems quickly, leading to higher product profits. This profit growth can come from increased customer retention, upselling, and cross-selling.

Becoming product-driven

Becoming a product-driven organization requires a multifaceted approach that encompasses various aspects of the business. Here are some key elements to consider:

Products supporting business-oriented value streams

A product-driven organization must clearly understand the value streams your products support. This means identifying the key business processes and customer needs your products are designed to address and aligning your product development efforts accordingly. By focusing on business-oriented value streams, you can ensure that your products are tightly integrated with your overall business strategy and deliver tangible value to your customers.

Learning, adaptive organization

A product-driven organization must also be a learning organization that can adapt quickly to evolving market conditions and dynamic customer needs. This demands a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation, where new ideas are encouraged, and failure is seen as a chance to learn and improve. By fostering a learning, adaptive organization, you can forge ahead of the competition and deliver products that truly meet customer requirements.

Continuous quality engineering systems & automation

To be able to deliver high-quality products at speed, it's important to have robust quality engineering systems in place. This means implementing automated testing and deployment processes and leveraging cutting-edge technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive efficiency and quality throughout the product development lifecycle. By prioritizing continuous quality engineering, you can ensure that your products are reliable, scalable, and deliver a consistently high level of performance.

Cutting-edge Technology for digital business models

Digital technologies are transforming how businesses operate, and a product-driven organization needs to be at the forefront of these developments. This means leveraging cutting-edge technologies like cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analytics to develop innovative digital business models that can drive growth and competitive advantage. By embracing cutting-edge technology, you can beat your competition and deliver products that match your customers' requirements.

Culture of respect, trust, learning, & autonomy

Finally, becoming a product-driven organization requires a culture of respect, trust, learning, and autonomy. This means fostering an environment where employees are empowered to take ownership of their work, are trusted to make decisions, and are given the autonomy to experiment and innovate. By creating a culture of respect, trust, learning, and autonomy, you can attract and retain top talent and create a workforce that is committed to driving the success of your products and your organization.

To become a product-driven organization, you require a holistic perspective covering all business aspects, from product development and quality engineering to culture and technology.

Wrapping up

Let’s sum up: the current business landscape demands that organizations adopt a product-driven approach to remain competitive. This approach brings numerous benefits, such as customer-centricity, innovation, cost savings, higher profits, improved responsiveness, and faster value realization. A multifaceted approach is necessary to become product-driven, encompassing several aspects of the business, including quality engineering, product development, culture, and technology. Organizations that prioritize these requirements and nurture a culture of trust, respect, learning, and autonomy can achieve sustainable competitive advantages and long-term success.

This article is the first part of our 3-part series of blogs on becoming a product-driven enterprise. To read the other blogs of this series, check out these links:

• The why and how of becoming a product-driven enterprise - Part 2: What does the product's CEO do?
• The why and how of becoming a product-driven enterprise - Part 3: Overcoming functional silos

As an ICAgile transformation member, Nagarro offers a Product Management Masterclass that explains how to become a product-driven enterprise. Find out more!