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.