Product organization made easy

A Product-first world

In 2001, seventeen software developers met to discuss how to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software / digital products. Together they published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. In 2002, Agile Software Development With Scrum (1) is published, describing what is now one of the most used frameworks to develop software / digital products.
Product management is described as starting from a Vision to deliver business Value Validated by the customer (the 3V).

In 2011, The Lean Startup (2) go further by refining the Validation phase with a more precise definition of the value hypothesis and their measurement.

Alongside, user-centered design is being developed to approach more the real needs of the user using a method also based on experimentation: the design thinking. The product starts to gain in attention over the advertising.

In 2014 is published Growth Hacker Marketing. A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising (3) which prone to improve retention first over acquiring more users.

In 2015, with Blackberry starting to pivot to Android devices, the smartphone screen, then mobile apps, start to take their full place and look like they do now. Same year, Google describes in what mobile usages are different with its survey on Micro Moments:

Today, you have to earn the customer’s consideration and action, moment after moment. Why? Because people are more loyal to their need in the moment than to any particular brand

further dedicating the product.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee

To follow these trends, organizations tried to adapt by largely adopting Scrum as a framework for development, calling on an UX designer to improve the experience and starting to make place in the Marketing-mix for this new product.

Then, we saw many compromises, in particular asking for PO as a job to just manage the proxy part of the role. As Scrum says, PO is a role of the Product Manager job, not a full-fledged job. This compromise also led to altered scaled Scrum as the ScrumXP in SAFe with a Product Owner limited to his proxy part.

Now, we are seeing other deformations in fields close to Product Management, with each of them trying to evolve on a deformed basis or take the head in a siloed fashion, leaving the cross-functional team:

• Product Manager for feature teams with Lead PMs,
  against the Scrum/Nexus recommendation to have a unique Product Manager
• the emergence of the Product Designer for the already existing job of UX designer,
  probably built on companies missioning external UX designers more for ergonomic mockups than for user discovery: a market deformation (business considerations always started the discovery phase).
• the Product Marketing Manager to manage the business strategic part of the job
• the arrival of the Growth Product Manager (one more manager) to manage the growth part in a dedicated team

In a world which turns from a sales lead to a marketing lead to maybe now a product lead, with a will to leave silos and realign the whole organization on business metrics, is it well thought to realign the whole by the product?

Why not Scrum?

We already have a framework for that, by chance it is also the widely adopted piece of organization: Scrum. In its ultimate form, the Scrum Product Owner is completely responsible over all product management decisions for both business and IT strategy. The Scrum Master recently gained the right to be a true leader more than a servant-leader, is it time for the Product Owner?

Much criticized before, since 2019 Scrum is officially integrated with UX. Why not integrating also the growth hacker in the team? The acquisition phase is part of the product experience, even for B2B.

Can we consider the startup “Product and Growth” model (4) as a target for every kind of companies, placing the lasting brick, the brand, as another channel or channel reinforcement?

Then, this target should drive the new product organizations and all new job creations, rather than the deformations of the market.

Why not Scrum?

References

(1) Agile Software Development with SCRUM, Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle
(2) The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
(3) Growth Hacker Marketing. A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising, Ryan Holiday
(4) Traction, Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares