After Agile transformations, organizations are expected to go further and are now turning to Product transformations. Involving profound changes, these efforts are often underestimated by top management. What are the prerequisites for a good Product transformation? How can it be carried out and what are the key points to watch out for? Here’s a look back at 10 years of Thiga expertise.
🤔 Define what’s really at stake with the transformation
🌍 Collaborate with the entire company
👥 Address all levels of the company
🌊 Approach transformation as a perpetual movement
🎯 Set ambitious and realistic goals
⚓️ Anchor principles rather than processes
💬 Communicate, again and again
🗺️ Have a skill internalization plan
🙋♂️ Surround yourself with experts
87%. That’s the proportion of executives who believe digital transformation is vital for their company’s sustainability, according to a Gartner study. While digital products are everywhere, their design and development require specific know-how and an organization capable of meeting the challenge of Product Management.
Many established companies like Habitat or Go Sport have failed to reinvent themselves, with digital proving to be fatal to them. So much so that the question is no longer "should we go for it?" but "how can we go for it effectively and relevantly?" Because transforming is not a smooth journey and some have gotten lost along the way.
At Thiga, we have been involved in our clients’ Product transformations for 10 years with major groups like Decathlon or L’Oréal, as well as smaller recognized players in their market such as Aristid or Manutan. Through these experiences, we have identified a set of key factors for effectively operating these transformations, and it’s time for us to share them with you.
🤔 Define what’s really at stake with the transformation
If organizations need to transform, it’s because the context has changed and they can no longer operate as they used to. Now, digital products are everywhere in companies, and their business impact is increasingly significant. The most visible ones provide customers with ever-improving experiences by offering new services and/or new touchpoints in the service of omnichannel. Others, less visible, support the business and bring greater efficiency, cost reductions, and ease employees’ lives. Regardless of their nature, all contribute to the company's business and are real profitability levers.
Unfortunately, the traditional organizational mode, still adopted by most companies, is not structured to optimally integrate tech and its specificities. With strong siloing leading to complex and slow decision-making, these companies are not ready to face a fast-paced ecosystem where innovation, proactivity, and execution excellence are necessary to survive. This is the challenge that Product transformation addresses, with the ultimate goal of developing high-impact digital products for users and businesses effectively and responsibly.
The motivations to undertake such a change vary according to the role digital products play in the business. Two types of organizations stand out:
- Those where the digital product is at the core of the value proposition and Tech is part of the DNA, generating business like Uber, Amazon, Microsoft, or Salesforce. These organizations have a vital need to excel in the product. Although the maturity level is generally good, they may still have areas for improvement, such as shifting from a Sales-Led to a Product-Led culture, especially for B2B SaaS.
- Those where digital products help serve a physical business and have had to integrate Tech into their organization like La Poste, Auchan, Europcar, or Chanel. For these organizations, digital fits into a more traditional value stream, and digital products are often seen as less strategic. The transformation must be initiated by recognizing their importance and reconnecting them to the company's business strategy.
Renaud Chevalier, Partner at Thiga and transformation specialist, explains why they are essential for companies: "Organizations are too siloed. A lot of people have been placed to act as links between teams to apply a company strategy. This is expensive, not very effective, and ultimately, it doesn’t work in a world where the ability and speed of adaptation are crucial. This is one of the main challenges of Product transformations that go far beyond simple digital products by addressing organizational issues through value streams."
If you think your transformation is limited to offering positions like Chief Product Officer, Head of Product, or Product Manager, know that it is doomed to fail. On the contrary, if you manage to connect the organization transformation to a business impact, then you are on the right track.
🌍 Collaborate with the entire company
Product Management at the company level requires fertile ground that goes beyond Product teams. The change requires mobilizing various areas of the company, including:
- IT: A mature Product team can deliver value quickly. This involves reducing Time-To-Market and raising expected quality standards, pulling subjects like “Move to Cloud,” observability, release management, or CI/CD.
- Business architecture: A mature Product team has a good level of autonomy in its scope. This involves a relevant division of teams, adapted to the company’s strategy, and capable of evolving with it.
- Governance and finance: A mature Product team knows how to adapt and innovate continuously. This requires flexibility in often heavy, rigid, and cautious governance and budget management processes.
- Business and sales teams: A mature Product team decides its roadmap because it has the overall vision of the product, both Business and Tech. However, business and sales must be active contributors to the Product strategy and thus the roadmap.
- Human resources: A mature Product team consists of specific talents. This requires alignment efforts on job descriptions, the ability to recruit the right profiles, and a willingness to internalize these skills (Product, Design, and Tech).
At L’Oréal, to address this plurality of impacted areas, we created a core team of experts in finance, human resources, and business architecture (among others) to have a 360-degree view and limit blind spots. With identified and acculturated relays in each domain, the answers provided by the transformation are more relevant and all embodied by an expert.
👥 Address all levels of the company
John Cutler, ex-Product Evangelist at Amplitude, recently said that a transformation "needs top-down coverage and bottom-up empowerment." Each level must contribute to the organization’s maturity growth.
Top management plays a sponsoring role capable of opening doors and influencing other departments to get on board. To achieve this, it must be acculturated and well-connected to the issues and conditions necessary for effective Product organization. It must also send strong messages to the driving elements of the transformation, particularly those making efforts and taking risks by valuing them. Even if this is extrinsic motivation, it has the merit of creating a beneficial dynamic for everyone. Without properly addressing top management, teams are hampered by the company’s heaviness and silos.
Middle management plays a "servant leadership" role for Product teams and their skill growth. Goodbye to "command and control," it’s time for trust and support! A lot of mentoring is required to help their teams overcome obstacles. According to Product guru Marty Cagan, “it is normal for first-level managers to need to spend up to 80% of their time on staffing and coaching.” This change of posture is not necessarily easy, hence the importance of recruiting well or supporting these people in changing posture. Without properly addressing middle management, teams are hampered by a lack of autonomy, and skill growth is painful.
Product teams are more autonomous. They must quit the role of simple executors and be aware of their responsibility for the impact they deliver. Team coaching can help understand this new responsibility and support teams in implementing new practices and a new way of thinking. Without properly addressing Product teams, they are hampered by their inability to make impactful decisions and delivery.
To address these three levels, three elements can be essential:
- Acculturation sessions to facilitate alignment on what the organization of tomorrow should be. Acculturation programs can be customized to the company’s context, like what Thiga implemented for Chanel with webinars and internal podcasts.
- Training to accelerate people’s skill growth by giving them reflection elements and actionable improvement paths. Training is not just for Product teams but can also be valuable for Product Leaders, especially if they do not come from the Product field.
- Coaching to provide personalized help in adapting to the specific context of the Product, its issues, and its ecosystem.
Combined, these three elements enable rapid progress in the organization’s maturity growth.
To learn more: download our book Product Oriented organizations
🌊 Approach transformation as a perpetual movement
Managing a transformation as a project with a beginning, middle, and end is illusory. Every company is forced to adapt to its environment to survive. In today’s ecosystem, changes are regular and unpredictable, referred to as a “VUCA” world—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. In such a context, is it reasonable to think that the organization will stop evolving at some point? You guessed it, the answer is "no."
Do Google, Netflix, or Spotify do Product Management the same way they did five years ago? Once again, the answer is "no." Regardless of its maturity level, the organization must be handled through a continuous improvement approach in order to allow the company to adapt, to reinvent itself, and to innovate so it can be among the best in its market.
Transformation must be seen as a perpetual movement. It’s a plan built continuously and self-nurturing with growing ambitions.
But beyond this, there are other risks to managing a transformation as a project:
- Losing the sense of transformation and focusing only on processes to be implemented. This is the “checkbox” syndrome. This behavior generally causes more resistance to change and greater difficulty reacting to new context elements.
- Succumbing to the ease of imposing off-the-shelf frameworks. Organizations are unique, and every framework contains its share of more or less important adaptations to fit this uniqueness. Imposing a framework “by the book” does not work.
- Prioritizing time constraint over the quality of change. Change management is then underestimated and treated short-term, with the bare minimum to meet the specifications. This will result in building a house of cards.
- Failing to anticipate the next steps and the importance of continuously reinventing oneself. Treating the subject as a project can lead to a non-perpetuated budget for skill growth (training and coaching, in particular), by considering reaching the destination when it is just the beginning of a new stage.
Renaud Chevalier shares his iterative approach to transformations by working on “capabilities”: “At La Poste, we address it by ‘capability’. We started with self-evaluation team radars. We focus on a maximum of four capabilities and, at the end of the quarter, we see if we have improved these capabilities. Having plans over two or three years is totally illusory.”
Transformation must be seen as a perpetual movement. It’s a plan built continuously and self-nurturing with growing ambitions. “Sky is the limit” as they say.
🎯 Set ambitious and realistic goals
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The same goes for a Product transformation. Being ambitious by drawing inspiration from startups/scale-ups is good! Being realistic by being aware of the organization’s current maturity level and its specific constraints related to its market, organization, or the nature of its products is better...
Wanting to implement OKRs is good. But is the data accessible? Is management capable of leaving the roadmap in the hands of the teams? Are the teams ready to take on this responsibility?
Wanting to do discovery is good. But do teams have easy access to users? Do they have access to the data? Do they seriously consider several solutions for the same problem? Do they test them quickly? Do they have the authority to say no to an opportunity if the discovery results show an irrelevant need?
Wanting to deliver continuously is good. But does the technical stack allow it? Are there strong dependencies with other teams? Is there a robust CI/CD chain? Are there automated non-regression tests? How are production incidents reported and managed?
Clément Schrepfer, a consultant at Thiga, tells us how he proceeded during his mission for Citeo: “After an immersion phase, we assessed the organization’s maturity using our framework based on the twenty principles of a Product organization. After presenting the results to our client, we built a transformation trajectory with them, considering the prerequisites and potential impacts, as well as identifying the biggest improvement levers. This work helped to get the teams on board and align on the right priorities.”
⚓ Anchor principles rather than processes
Transforming means changing habits within a company. Does imposing frameworks, new processes, or new practices have an impact? Maybe. Is it sustainable? I doubt it.
Acting as a processes rigorist without explaining their underlying principles does not make the organization autonomous.
Processes are safeguards to achieve efficiency by avoiding repeating an error. In theory, it sounds good. The problem arises when the goal becomes adhering to the process, and employees no longer know how to step back when it becomes obsolete.
To implement Product culture, rather than applying certain practices or methodologies “by the book,” it’s necessary to anchor six strong principles:
- Adopt a “user-centric” approach. By focusing on the user and their problems, you’ll find the solutions which will more likely generate engagement and therefore, more or less directly, business outcomes.
- Be focused. Strategically concentrating on the most important topics, though there may be few of them, maximizes user and business impact.
- Use impact measurement as a compass. Value-driven management is a real cultural shift. Continually asking about ROI in order to prioritize or to adjust the plan may seem like common sense, but traditional project management does not have this reflex of impact measurement.
- Encourage risk-taking and experimentation. These elements are key to finding innovative solutions that stand out from the competition.
- Provide autonomy and responsibility to teams. This gives meaning to the teams and encourages them to take initiative within a defined framework.
- Collaborate effectively. Good integration of all expertise and viewpoints allows faster development of more relevant solutions.
Some of these principles are common to Agility, and there is nothing abnormal, quite the contrary. Agility and Product share the same values.
Marty Cagan writes in his book “Transformed” that “if you understand the first principles of the Product Operating Model, you can quickly judge whether a new process, technique, or role is useful or harmful.” Acting as a processes rigorist without explaining their underlying principles does not make the organization autonomous and capable of intelligently adapting to context changes.
💬 Communicate, again and again
A transformation must have a real communication strategy with three main objectives:
- Ensure top management and stakeholder support. With conciseness and clarity, giving visibility on progress helps sustain the investments made in the transformation. Maintaining trust and a relationship with top management also opens doors and influences other departments.
- Acculturate a larger number with minimal effort. The less concerned may feel left out. Having general acculturation sessions on the transformation’s objectives and initiatives gives a broad understanding to many, necessary when it eventually impacts them.
- Maintain a continuous dynamic. Unless you invest huge resources, it is impossible to support all Product teams. Communicating well about the transformation’s visible impacts and keeping everyone informed of progress creates a desire to change, also capitalizing on others’ experiences. It is also necessary to create exchange spaces between peers, notably through practice communities, real levers to raise the organization’s skill level.
Communication can be limited to the results and impact achieved, but talking about how they have been achieved is an underestimated element that contributes to overall acculturation and shows the way to those who want to progress.
All this communication should truly be seen as transformation marketing with the importance it implies. Having a relevant and audience-adapted communication strategy is fundamental to maintaining enthusiasm and a conducive climate.
🗺️ Have a skill internalization plan
Internalizing key skills should be a priority. Certainly, outsourcing offers budget flexibility. But if the company is not ready to invest in recruiting certain profiles, it means it only half-believes in the transformation. The investment can be progressive, but it must be an ambition. Four profiles should be internalized as a priority:
- Product Leaders capable of participating in overall evangelization and mentoring Product teams.
- Product Managers acting as real PMs able to challenge a roadmap, lead discovery phases, and use data for decision-making.
- Product Designers imbued with Product culture and not seen as mere mockup creators.
- Tech Leads and developers placing quality and impact at the heart of their decisions.
These profiles must be aware they are evolving in a low-maturity context. New, more senior profiles must then serve as relays to evangelize the rest of the organization unfamiliar with Product Management.
To sustain the organization and help in its perpetual quest for excellence, it is interesting to complement the organizations with Ops profiles (Product Ops, Design Ops, Tech Ops).
🙋♂️ Surround yourself with experts
At Thiga, we believe that transformation should be led and embodied by an internal leader to support messages, share their network, and signal a lasting change. To complement this environment knowledge, it seems important to rely on Product transformation experts.
Transforming means bringing Product excellence into the company. Having experienced Product Management allows speaking concretely, with conviction, and creating strong empathy with operational staff. The messenger is often as important as the message. Having legitimacy and providing a market vision different from what the company knows is crucial and not easy to find internally.
💪 Show resilience
“Transformation is hard” is the title of the talk by Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group Christian Idiodi, during the last LPC, and we can only support this message. Due to the topic’s complexity and the multitude of stakeholders, who are not always convinced of the need to change at first, it is essential to show resilience.
Transforming is like gardening. Initially, you plant seeds, then water them for days without seeing any change. Then one day, the first shoots appear, then the first leaves, and everything speeds up.
While it is possible to have an impact on one person or team in a few weeks, having an impact at the organizational level can take months, and some may feel discouraged by this long-term impact. Some barriers take longer to break down than others, but when they do, the impact is multiplied, rewarding all the efforts deployed. This requires a strong dose of resilience.
Leading a transformation is complex, but it is a fundamental step to facilitate the organization’s entry into a world where the company’s performance is closely linked to its digital products’ performance. History is in the making; it’s now up to you to make the right choice.
To learn more: download our book Product Oriented Organizations
