Transforming your organization to become a product organization
In the last decade, digital transformation initiatives – recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic – have become ubiquitous throughout medium and large organizations. Literature is quick to point to the failure rate of these initiatives – the reasons cited often being a lack of user involvement, cross-functional coordination, executive commitment, and strategic alignment. Most of these areas are addressed by the product organization.
The concept of product management originated from Procter & Gamble, where Neil McElroy wrote a memo requesting to hire people and structure them around a single product or brand. The ultimate responsibility of brand men would be to manage the product life cycle, sales, and promotions – supported by field testing and customer interaction. Many additional and complementary concepts, theories, and practices have emerged since then, including Kanban (1940s...
