Friday, July 31, 2015

Part 2: Are you buildng Products or Solutions?

This is the second of a two-part article

In part one of this article, I made the case that incentives hold back companies from creating products that work together. But, is it really that simple? Let us look at some issues and potential solutions.

Previously erected silos will prevent BU leaders from working together. Selling a solution is a lot harder than selling a product, so sales leaders won’t buy in. And unless there is strong leadership in product management, roadmaps will never be coordinated. Even if all of this happens, engineering managers may have to make the decision of putting in more time and effort to coordinate deliveries across products, which means they may not be able to meet previously committed dates.

This is where strong leadership and company culture matters a great deal. The ability to work across groups, communicate points of view, and obtain commitments from other teams to work together is critical to adopting a solution-first approach.

 Assuming the leadership commits to the solution-first approach, how would a company actually institutionalize this?

Here are a few steps:

1. Product management leadership defines the cross-product strategy and articulates why the solution(s) approach will be more valuable to customers. Key pieces of the strategy include the following:
·      An agreement to an approach for creating solutions as there are many ways to do this. For e.g. Will BigCo create a platform which must be the foundation for the different products?
·      What’s the there a budget and how is it implemented across the different BUs?
·      What is the joint sales and marketing strategy? How will these be sold and delivered?
·      What is the cross-department R&D plan? How will resources be shared?
·      How will the products be supported post roll-out?
2. Create a business case that shows the benefits of going to market as one solution instead of individual products – if the pie is bigger, there will be more appetite for BU leaders to adopt the solution-first approach
3. Create roadmaps that explicitly show the dependencies on other related products
4. Joint pricing, messaging, etc. are all worked on across the different marketing teams
5. Sales teams are educated to sell a solution vs a product, and the incentives are well understood
6. R&D managers understand the impact of other product’s delivery timelines and the roll-out of individual products is well coordinated. Future releases are planned and EOL discussions are determined taking into account the impact on all teams
7. A clear support plan is outlined and is in place prior to the release of the solution(s). This is not a trivial process – how will support route calls if there are multiple development teams and overlapping functionality?

In summary, going to market with a solution-first approach requires a clear understanding of the overall strategy across product lines, benefits for the customer, explicit commitment from leadership to making this a reality, and a clear understanding of the incentives for the various internal teams. 

Although we haven't solved every problem here, we can make great strides in ensuring our solutions' success. Without all of this in place, a solution-first culture will be very hard to implement. 

Do you see these issues as well? Do you agree with the solutions presented or do you have other feedback? Please feel free to leave a comment.

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