Project to Product Mindset (simple approach)

There are several strategies of going from Project to Product Mindset. Here are few quick steps from IT Revolution Press' Project to Product.

1. What is a product?

2. A service or offering or which delivers value to customer

3. The goal of moving to the product model is to increase flow and reduce lead time while maintaining or improving quality and cost

4. In a product you prioritize the customer and orient your teams around customer outcomes.

5. What is a normal Product Lifecycle.

6. Introduction: The product is new to the market and hasn’t had a lot of traction since being released.

7. Growth: The product hits a tipping point at the end of the introductory stage that pushes it into a rapid growth mode.

8. Maturity: At this point in the product’s stage, it is firing on all cylinders, but the product begins to show a slowing of growth and eventually shows signs of decline.

9. Decline: The product has started to show signs of weakness and is losing its value to customers.

4. How IT Product Lifecycle will relate to this?

5. At what point Projects started to become Products?

• Projects turn to products at the point where the team has delivered the first MVP of the product

• Once the product is released to the customer and value has begun to be measured, the team will start to iterate on features to add additional value to customers or reduce risk as the product matures

• If there are no more changes then also think from 'additional value' perspective. Can you reduce risk to deliver better value, faster value?

6. What are the differences between Project Oriented and Product Oriented Approach?

7. How to get started.

a. Define Product Backlog, Product Owners, Product Teams: If there is a set of features which needs to be built then it should go to a product backlog, prioritized by product owner and build by product team. This is like brining work to teams.

b. Start small - find one area which is ready to go into Product Centric Mindset. Success of this area can change conversation from "It can't be done" to "how it can be done". Always start small in products where MVP can be defined.

c. Label this as an experiment and promote learning - In order to run an experiment, there must be criteria to determine if it is, in fact, successful or not. Examples of metrics to track are things like flow metrics (e.g., flow of business value stories, work in progress, cycle time, through point, item age etc.).

d. Make it visible through Kanban Boards etc.

e. Show and tell and celebrate small wins.

f. Have the patience to persevere

Hashtags: #Product #ProjectToProduct #Products #Agile #Scrum #MVP

Ref: IT Revolution Press. Moving from Project to Product: Modernizing Traditional Enterprise Operating Models

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