🚀 EVO16: Case study - Product Evolution Series with an extended Platform team

Product Evolution is about helping Product professionals, Product teams, Product organizations and the products they develop to level up.

Bülent Duagi

Aug 21, 2023

Here is an example of a practice program that you can implement in your own company or for your clients.

The design of the program is focused on helping people in a Product team to level up together as a team, and also learn from the other stakeholders who are working in the program.

About the team in the program

Core platform team: Product Manager, Product Owner and Product Analyst.
Extended platform team: UX Designer, Software Developers, Marketing, Customer Support, E2E Business Process Manager and others.

Focus: Developing and transitioning to a new B2B E-commerce platform.

I’ve co-designed, organized and co-facilitated the program with the Product Manager and the E2E Business Process Manager. The program has been sponsored by the company Managing Director.

Series of Practice Sprints

Based on the initial assessment of what the team needs, we’ve done the following series:

6 x Practice sprints, 2 weeks each;
Sprint 1: Platform Strategy. Deliverable: Platform Vision Board, including Platform Mission, Platform Vision, Platform Strategy and Platform Goals;
Sprint 2: Platform Insights. Deliverable: Trends Map, Platform Insights Radar;
Sprint 3: Platform Roadmap. Deliverable: Platform Development Roadmap, with streams like Steering & Governance, Clarify Internal Business Logic, User Research & Customer Testing, Delivery of MVP, Measurements and Change Management;
Sprint 4: Platform Delivery. Deliverable: E2E Delivery flow - containing both preparation and development;
Sprint 5: Service Blueprint Mapping. Deliverable: E2E Service Blueprint Map across all layers: Customer Journey (Journey steps, actions, needs and obstacles, customer feeling), Frontstage (Epics, visible touchpoints), Backstage (Back end actions, internal epics, support processes & ownership), Opportunities (For customers, for internal users);
Sprint 6: Platform Discovery. Deliverable: Selection of most suitable 6 discovery techniques based on a long list of 80 techniques.

Practice sprints are dedicated to working and finishing the deliverables needed by the Product team by the end of the 2 weeks-period.

Note: This work has been done in the 15% bandwidth allocated besides the 85% geared towards Product Delivery work.

Each practice sprint had a mix of the following activities:

Work Review 1h Review session dedicated on reviewing the work of the Platform team.
Workshop 1-2h Hands-on exercises, concepts, examples, tools, case studies.
1:1 Mentorship 1h Mentorship session with the Product Manager.

3 key insights

There are ways to level up together as a Product team through practice and learning on the go.

Once again, sponsorship from sr. leaders in the company is key for allowing the team to invest bandwidth in practice sprints to level up (and not only focus 100% on delivery).
Also, involving the extended team contributes to a better sense of shared mission with the development of the product and also with unexpected insights about the market or the technological evolutions.
Finally, in the case of this program - an important a-ha moment was about the change management around the adoption and continuous usage of the deliverables. How do you bring these deliverables in the working life of the team, where they are continuously used and evolved? (and not be left forgotten on a slide deck or Miro board).

Keep on evolving 🚀
Bülent

As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:

🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.