CX up your Program! Leadership Lessons from Product Thinking

As I sat next to my old colleague, who now works for The National Trust in the UK, I asked "What do you do at the Trust"?

"I'm a product manager."

"Oh! Beyond the membership, what are the products?"

"You know... Visits, Events, that kind of thing"

"Ooooohhh!" Clink!

The clink was the noise of the penny dropping. I hadn't thought about products that way. For me, a "product" had to be a discrete something that could be ordered, or at least given away. But now that penny has dropped I see products everywhere:

• The renewal experience for my car insurance
• The government portal and tools for doing my taxes
• The post-sales for long-lived products like cars and lawnmowers

Key elements of Product thinking

We've already talked about how our programs should be exquisitely connected to the overarching business strategy (It's The Value, Stupid!) and how we can build clarity on feasible ways to fulfil that strategy and measure how we are doing (Where Are We Going Again?).

From Dawn Stygal who heads up the Product Practice at Motability Operations, the largest car fleet operator in Europe, I recently learnt that Product thinking exists at the intersection of

• Customer Experience - things the customer or user wants. Ease. Reduction of effort
• Business Strategy - the commercial strategy of the organization. What has a positive contribution to the mission
• Ability to execute (Engineering, Build) - what is actually possible and can feasibly be done

This is pretty powerful! If we limit ourselves to the things people care about across CX, business strategy and ability to execute we can become really clear on

• Removing the fluff from roadmaps
• Trying experiments in a controlled and limited way, then building on what works
• Prioritizing the Customer
• Continuous Improvement

As you can see, there is a lot of overlap with designing and structuring a transformation program, but I think the thing that the Product lens does so well is force the thinking about the Customer Experience. And I think this is going to be increasingly important as internal processes become commoditized.

Processes becoming Commoditized?

This particular update to my sovereign neural network came at an opportune time. I'd already been thinking about where we are going with SaaS, Agentic AI and Customer Experience, along these lines:

• SaaS gives everyone the ability to deploy best-in-class processes and technology, as long as we do not unnecessarily customize (A Word on Customization - Don't!)
• Business processes are increasingly outsourced
• As internal and external processes become more commoditized, companies must innovate on product and service. CX starts to become everything. Think about cars. They are all good now. The difference is the ownership experience
• Agentic AI has the potential to accelerate this once the guardrails problems are solved. Projecting forward wildly for a moment, it could drive the collapse of organizational silos. Agents don't care as much about what the reporting lines are. The classic issue of the Marketing view of the Customer and the Sales view and the Support view has the potential to disappear as the availability of an agentic approach makes it easier and more imperative to implement cross-organizational processes

Procure to Pay, an example of a commoditized business process

The predictions made by Thomas H Davenport in HBR 20 years ago have unfolded perfectly!

How to bring Product Thinking into the Program

One way of bringing Product thinking into programs is to identify the customer/user experiences we want as business capabilities to be created. Then we can attach metrics like Customer Effort, Satisfaction and NPS to them and see how we are being effective, or where we have the potential to be. Ideally we do this by using the existing digital exhaust we have captured in our analytics hub (CRM Analytics: Practical Strategies for a Messy, Multi-Platform World)

The strategic focus of Programs and Products is similar, but the ongoing nature may not be. When your program is finished you will have product(s) that need to be managed. In the past I'd done this by using program management techniques, even without a temporary, strategic program, in order to maintain coherence and alignment to business strategy. Should I have used a Product Management approach instead? I think it might have been clearer.

Shifting the organization entirely to a product-oriented approach takes more that bringing in a CX value driver. It takes either an organizational change or an overlay to construct collaborating product-oriented work teams, similar to the teams in Agile. I haven't done that yet, but I see value in bringing product thinking into programs more explicitly.

Key product questions are extremely useful and exist in some form in many kinds of "make work better" frameworks: product management, program management and agile to name three popular overlapping lenses. 

• Does the customer/user value this thing?
• Does it promote our business strategy in a way that is clear and meaningful enough to explain?
• Can we actually do it in a way that preserves the relevance to the previous two questions?

In Summary

Product Management, Customer Experience, Agile, Program Management are all overlapping ways of looking at how we improve things, sometimes in a transformational way.

I'm liking the clarity that the key questions asked by Product Thinking brings, and I plan to explicitly call out the Customer/User lens in Programs I lead or advise going forward, perhaps as explicit Business Capabilities with their own metrics.

Programs should incorporate the key thinking behind product management if they are to deliver value in a competitive landscape. You might not need the overhead of a transformation program, but you probably do have products and the thinking that comes with product orientation is very healthy.

Where have you seen transformation programs bring in product thinking successfully, or not? Let me know!

Stay curious,
Gareth