TRAINING

Progressive Product Thinking

“Essentially, the Product Model is about consistently creating technology-powered solutions that your customers love, yet work for your business”, says Marty Cagan in his (and SVPG’s) book TRANSFORMED. The book explains how successful product companies work after they have transformed three key aspects from traditional project-led or sales-led development of technology to a more progressive and modern product-led development. The three key aspects are:

  • Changing how you build things – which tackles the fact that however well you build your product, what matters more is how agile you can be when building and releasing. This is usually called Product Delivery.
  • Changing how you solve problems – which tackles the fact that it is easy to come up with ideas, but harder to know which ideas that are worthy of implementing. This is usually called Product Discovery. 
  • Changing how you decide which problems to solve – which tackles the fact that serving only the business will get you so far, what matters more is how you serve your customers. This is usually called Product Strategy.

Change of this kind is not only a change in methods or similar, i.e. a transition, but actually a more profound shift in thinking, i.e. a transformation, in itself. In short, the Product Model requires people to have fundamentally understood and embraced a progressive way of thinking.

Here’s a few statements:

  • You cannot plan yourself to success when you have a product for any kind of customer or user, because they will change their minds when they learn new things or the context changes.
  • This means that most kinds of estimations, budgets and deadlines are truly impossible to follow.
  • Building a feature fast is almost always worse than building it well – better matching to the customers situations.
  • Tackling the high risks first will make any development project actually reach its goals faster and better.
  • 5 team members in front of one computer usually yield a significantly better result than 5 team members in front of one computer each.

If any of these didn’t make sense to you, this training is for you.

This training

This training walks through the premises of the Product Model, but from the aspects of what needs to be changed in the mindset of people, and enables that change to happen. You do not need to know the Product Model beforehand, but if you want to learn more of the details before or after this training, check out my list of related trainings below.

Who this training is for

This training is for anyone working in a product organisation, such as product leaders, product managers, product designers, product developers and other team members.

Outcomes of the training

After this training, you will understand why

  • Principles are more important than process
  • Trust is better than control
  • Innovation is more important than predictability
  • We value learning over failure
  • Teams should be empowered with problems to solve
  • Outcomes are more important than output
  • A real sense of ownership is important
  • Collaboration is key
  • Saying no is better than saying yes
  • Insights come from the outside, not the inside
  • Radical transparency is key
  • Product strategy means placing bets
  • Minimising waste is important
  • Adressing risk before you build is important
  • Embracing rapid experimentation and testing ideas responsibly go hand in hand
  • Everything must be in the form of small, frequent, uncoupled releases … using a strong deployment infrastructure
  • Instrumentation and monitoring will support you throughout

That is, the why behind all of the principles in the Product Model.

Uniqueness

This training is unique in its way of challenging the participants through simulations and experiences, to make them move away from the traditional and conservative models like classic project management and SAFe towards a more nimble, agile, effective and impactful way.

Training setup

This is a two to three days long training, on-site, preferably with the whole product organisation in the room together.

In the following trainings, I teach principles and methods of the Product Model:

Expression of interest

Sign up here if you are interested in this training and I will contact you to discuss how we can set it up.