Product Transformation - Creating the Right Alliance for Change

What is the most overlooked factor when setting up a successful product transformation, before it even starts? Arguably, it is underestimating or failing to set up the right alliance for change.

Let me start by telling a story illustrating what this pitfall can look like.

‍A story of a failed product change effort

The CPO had big plans. During the last year or so since arriving he had been working hard on a well prepared inspiring new product vision. In addition, a new small scale design initiative had generated some early prototypes showing strong potential of becoming highly innovative. This could be the major splash that the company needed, to rejuvenate the brand’s position as a progressive force in the market.

But there were obstacles to achieving the vision. The organization was saturated with work and had a hard time prioritizing the few things that would matter the most. The way the organization operated just did not offer the capability needed.

To address this gap the CPO introduced some new ways of working, hoping that if the product side led the way the tech side would eventually evolve with them.

A couple of times soon after being hired he had tried talking with tech leadership about the need to change how we operated, but the response had been lukewarm at best. There was some receptiveness to making changes, but primarily to accommodate specific needs at a project level.

The outlook of elongated conversations with tech leadership and potentially butting some heads on why something more significant was needed looked like it would become an energy drain. So the call was to move forward with what could be done now. If the vision was great and the design innovative and fresh, engagement and execution should naturally follow eventually, right?

Fast forward one year and the effort was no more. Tech leadership had interpreted the effort as something driven by product, rather than a shared company critical bet. Meaning, they supported the project, but did not experience a strong sense of urgency of putting something new and innovative in the market badly enough to make real tradeoffs.

Instead, informal and formal leaders had continued to prioritize work driven by other diverse goals. This included pulling key people from this new product bet in the middle of the effort, because tech leadership believed they were better needed elsewhere to plug all the many tactical holes that strained tech capacity.

As an organization, strategic focus had not been established and the culture had not fundamentally changed enough to enable working in alignment on a significant and innovative new product. Instead things stayed optimized for the status quo of dealing with a thousand small and lower impact requests. Effectively, product and tech still ran mostly separate playbooks.

Still, just as the promising bold effort was nearing ready to be shown to the public, courage and conviction was lost. Just like several initiatives before it, the new product idea was killed just before the finish line.

Support from the right people makes all the difference

You need support from enough of the right people before you start a product transformation. If you don’t you can get misalignment, lack of integration of ideas, friction and more. Eventually somebody steps on the breaks, stopping your momentum.

Someone unfamiliar with the CPO role might assume they can unilaterally implement any changes within the product organization. The reality is something quite different, that for any significant change you will need support and help from other leaders and your peers.

And this is far from limited to just tech and product. Sales, marketing and customer success are key players for the go to market and customer experience of any product. Any changes to product investment funding models or the monetization of your products will be impacted by your degree of support from finance, and so forth.

Product transformation requires an alliance for change. But who do you want in that alliance before launching a transformation, and why?

Asking the right questions

The first step to asking the right questions is to consider your drivers for change. What are the highest leverage reasons for us to proactively engage in significant change?

Determining your authentic drivers requires hard work and is really hard to rush. It is a form of homework that often will deepen your relationships with your peers.

After finding what you think are your top drivers, ask the following two questions.

‍Imagine that we resolve these drivers for change, what areas of the org are likely to be influenced by that change? Who are the people formally accountable for those areas?

Let me give you a positive real world example.

‍How asking the right questions changed the game, before it begun

Some years ago I got in contact with what would soon after become a client of mine. The initial request came from the head of Tech of a small but successful product company. She described her current challenges, which could be boiled down to three major areas.

• Strained Tech/IT to Business relationship, low line of sight to customer and business goals, weak results.
• Cultural differences, agile and tech culture vs lean and industrial business culture. Lack of common ground.
• Friction in the current operating model, nobody was happy about the current way of working. Low employee satisfaction.

Her request was to bring in help, to address these areas of need. From her point of view as head of tech, she felt that she needed some help to drive change from a tech point of view.

Instead of trying to set up a partnership to help her tech organization, I instead asked her these two questions.

‍Imagine that we resolve these drivers for change, what areas of the org are likely to be influenced by that change? Who are the people formally accountable for those areas?

This made her think. After some pause, she responded that to resolve this she believed we might have to involve some of her peers on the business side. The questions revealed a critical insight: this wasn’t just a tech problem, she realized. It was a shared challenge between tech and business, and she needed her peers on board from the start, to address it cleanly.

Two weeks later she had set up a new meeting, and this time she had some of her senior business colleagues with her. This time it was clear to not just me that they were describing a need to address something that both parties desired to resolve.

This became a great start to what later would become a very successful product transformation.

‍Lessons highlighted by this example

It is not just what problems you are trying to solve. It is also who you are trying to help in doing so and who is going to be affected by that change. It is about shaping ownership - ensuring the right people have skin in the game to address shared problems to solve.

If your drivers for change involve multiple areas of your organization, then you will likely need the involvement and support of people accountable for these areas. And you need to find a way to phrase what those drivers are in a way that all parties can become aligned on.

As a corollary, if you lack support for one specific area then hold off on trying to address a driver that would involve change in that area.

We have now established the first important criteria for who needs to be involved. Let's look at how we can tune the composition of our alliance for the best chances of success.

Tuning your alliance to the right composition

There are four qualities I want to highlight from experience as especially valuable in a leader when it comes to initiating, governing and supporting major product change.

Multi-disciplined competency

The word transformation indicates holistic change, meaning that we desire the properties of the whole to change. To do this it is not enough to just change the parts. We also typically need to change how the parts fit together into a whole.

To guide such change skillfully, one requirement is access to competency and experience in multiple disciplines relevant to the areas of change.

Collaboration skills

Transformations are inherently interdisciplinary, making collaboration indispensable. No single leader can achieve this alone—it requires a collective effort. That takes teamwork and the mindset that the right shared contribution and combined strengths will create the results.

Change leadership skills

By its own nature, leading major change requires solid understanding of the professional domains at play as well as understanding the human nature of change, both in individuals and in the collective.

Many factors go into this. Some of the more important qualities are the ability to communicate in a way that invites and mobilizes engagement to drive change while at the same time being clear about what we are trying to change and why. Other important aspects have to do with being able to skillfully select the right problems to solve in a viable order, and create great conditions for successful change initiatives.

Courage

This may be the most important personal trait you want in your alliance for change. Having a courageous leader supporting your transformation is absolutely indispensable. I have seen courage make a huge difference more than once.

The type of courage you are looking for is very specific. Transformation is not about blind bravery or boldness. You want people with the willingness to take the risks necessary to do the right thing, because they have good reason to believe that is what will get us to where we want. The conviction to do what is necessary to give ourselves the best chance to succeed with a worthy, high ambition goal.

Eventually your transformation is likely to reach a pivotal moment. When that happens you want somebody with the courage to “Take the Hit” if needed, to persist and progress your transformation.

How many people in your alliance for change?

The short answer is as few as possible, but not fewer than you missing out on too many of the above qualities.

The right number and setup can be culture specific. In some organizations, senior leaders and executives are capable of collaborating and sharing accountability effectively in teams in a way that collective ownership is very real. In other organizations you may absolutely need to designate someone to assume accountability to lead a lower number of senior leaders, or else your people won’t experience real ownership.

As a very general rule of thumb, somewhere between 2-5 senior leaders is a good number.

From my experience, when transforming to a modern product operating model from a more conventional setup with more than one challenge a general case right alliance can include the following

• CPO and CTO or equivalent, actively leading
• Supportive peer involvement from senior leaders in Sales, Marketing and Finance as needed
• High level support to active support from CEO

In addition to the above, it is advisable to pull in two or three external product coaches as the picture starts to become a bit more clear, for supporting and guiding the transformation.

What does the right alliance do?

In short, they align on drivers for change and desired future capabilities, until these and the right alliance have been integrated into a clear narrative of what the transformation is expected to achieve and why.

After this, the alliance takes the first steps to start a transformation, typically by making an assessment of key challenges and problems to solve and setting up a transformation leadership team that will govern the transformation.

Summary

The right people to be involved in your alliance for change are typically some of your most influential people in the areas of expected change. You want to tune your composition of people to exhibit specific qualities highly valuable when directing and supporting major change.

If you have only secured leadership support for some areas of your organization, only attempt to address drivers expected to involve those areas.

Your alliance for change sets the stage for starting your transformation.

Who in your organization would you want in your alliance? Start identifying them today.

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