In navigating new, unprecedented change, disruption, and fluidity, teams simply can’t rely on guesswork and second-hand interpretations. To succeed, teams need to embrace data-driven product management. Data needs to be leveraged across every level and every team in the business, which is essential in powering more people to make better decisions and deliver more value. This post examines why data-driven product management is now so vital.
Today’s leadership teams are being tasked with navigating business terrain that’s seeing unprecedented volatility. Radically changing market dynamics and consumer behaviors and high unemployment are raising concerns about revenues in the coming quarters, and about fundamental disruption to the competitive landscape in the long term.
In this new paradigm, executives are especially keen to demonstrate value. It’s increasingly incumbent upon them to move beyond simply listing tasks and deliverables, and start demonstrating how their contributions are helping the business navigate change and thrive. To meet their charters, leaders will need to find ways to make significant strides in the following arenas:
Where do you start? Which is most important? The answer is “all of the above.” All three of these aspects are critical. While there may have been a time when an executive could stay focused on improving a single attribute, that time is not now.
Teams may have been focused on accelerating delivery, but if it introduces compromises in quality, speed may do more harm than good. Further, speeding up teams won’t matter without strategic alignment. If teams aren’t building the right things, it doesn’t matter how fast they build them. Put another way, all the automation in the world won’t make your strategies right.
While the need to gain optimal alignment is vital, statistics show many teams are falling short:
This lack of alignment significantly increases the potential for wasted time and money. Too many projects don’t ultimately deliver value. Every day, $5 billion is wasted due to the poor implementation of strategy.5
Where is all this waste originating? One common problem is that organizations are bearing the burden of so-called zombie or orphan projects. An executive sponsor leaves the organization or loses interest in a project, but the project remains in the backlog. Significant resources get expended, but the project may not see the light of day, or worse, gets completed but never gets fully implemented or used. Either way, a lot of resources are invested in projects that never deliver any real value.
This waste has long been a problem, but it is one that is currently being exacerbated by increasingly fluid personnel dynamics. Many organizations are having unprecedented flux in their leadership teams as, with increasing regularity, executives are being offered early retirement, moving into different departments, or joining other companies.
As leaders look to weed out waste and optimize their strategies, they’re stymied by their organization’s means for tracking work. For the most part, teams are still building status reports based on accounts from meetings and manually aggregating reports into higher level summaries.
These approaches present a number of problems:
In speaking with enterprise executives, I’m often asked the same question: “How can we do more with less?” My response is always the same: Today, that’s not the right question.
Instead, leaders need to determine how they can get their existing teams to start doing less—and ensure that they’re only focused on the highest value things. The question needs to be, “How do I get teams to do the right things, focusing only on the highest value projects and deliverables?”
The answer? In a word, data. To start to ensure that teams are focused on the right efforts, data-driven product management is essential.
To start employing data in a way that empowers teams to focus on what really matters, it is important to pursue the following efforts.
Over time, teams have continued a transition, moving to break annual strategies into two-week sprints. In the process, teams are increasingly generating a pipeline of data. Rather than relying on verbal status reports and manual report aggregation, teams need to start tracking progress based on this data.
It is key to harness this data, as quickly and efficiently as possible, which is driving the need for automation. Through automation, teams can eliminate laborious status reporting, costly rollup efforts, and time-consuming status meetings, while getting improved data to fuel optimized operations and decision making.
To combat waste and identify opportunities for optimization, it is critical to gain visibility into the entire value stream, all the steps involved in getting from an idea to an outcome, or from concept to cashflow. It is only when you understand every step in the process that you can identify bottlenecks and waste and start to streamline workflows from end to end. (To learn more about modeling and tracking data across the value stream, see my Lean Portfolio Management post.)
Further, it is only by establishing this holistic transparency that executives can prevent work from being done on those wasteful orphan and zombie projects. It is important to monitor whether project sponsors are still with the company and each specific effort remains aligned with business priorities. Once this visibility is established, executives can quickly and intelligently weed out waste associated with non-strategic work.
It is also vital to establish capabilities for disseminating data across the organization, while tailoring visibility to specific roles. To reference a recent article on the Forbes Tech Council site, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies will offer enormous advantages, but only when teams across the organization can harness those technologies. In the article, entitled, “Leading Confidently Through Crisis: How Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Help,” Serge Lucio, GM of Broadcom Enterprise Software, writes, “The collective intelligence that AI and machine learning technologies afford is immense. However, the power of these instruments is ultimately measured by the degree to which people actually interpret, understand, act on, and share the insights delivered.”
Data needs to be available at every level of the organization, including for teams, directors, and vice presidents, with dashboards and reports that are tailored to an individual’s specific level, role, and permissions. It is vital to ensure the right information is offered to the right person, so the intelligence gleaned is actionable. I remember meeting with a director of a large team who showed me how he was receiving alerts whenever a build broke. However, aside from potentially taking the counterproductive step of chastising a responsible team member, there wasn’t any actionable information the director could take away. Simply having more data doesn’t translate to better insights. Therefore, it’s vital to think through the purpose behind the delivery of data and the expected actions that can be taken.
By moving from a status report- to data-driven approach, organizations can benefit in a number of ways:
Success today requires precision. Waste, inefficiency, and redundancy, while never a good thing, are now particularly disastrous. Teams need to be working on the right things, at the right times, and in the right ways. Rather than relying on out of date, time consuming manual accounts and roll ups, teams need to leverage timely, accurate data to establish the precision required.