From running projects to making the business case

The situation

A European software group was changing how it made money. For years it had built custom software for each client. Now it wanted to sell products: one thing, built once, sold to many customers.

That shift lands hardest on product managers. An internal skills review had found the group’s product managers were strong on delivery and technology, and much less sure of the commercial side: who the customer really is, what problem is worth solving, what people will pay, and whether an idea is worth building at all. Most had come up through agile delivery teams, or from sales and marketing. Very few had been product managers anywhere else.

The group had six business units, each working in its own way and each at a different stage of the change. HR wanted something that would inspire the product managers first, then coach them through real work.

What we did

I started by meeting the head of each business unit, to understand where their product managers were and what the unit needed from them.

Then 76 product managers came together for a two-day forum. Before it, each wrote a “Dear Customer” letter: Amazon’s way of describing a product from the customer’s side, before anyone builds it. I ran the two days to be mostly hands-on: short teaching, then small groups, live feedback, and people presenting their ideas from the stage. One participant suggested everyone pitch themselves on stage. We added it on the spot, and it became one of the moments people remembered.

Over the next five months I coached each business unit’s product managers every few weeks, in groups of one to seven. Each group took a real idea from its letter and turned it into a business case. Between sessions they did the legwork: talking to customers, sizing the market, working out pricing, deciding what to build first and calculating the return. Then they brought what they’d found back to the next session, and we worked through it together.

At the end I debriefed HR on what the teams had learned, and on how leaders could support the change from the top.

What happened

The business cases were real, and some were strong:

• One team’s case for a new reporting feature showed a return of about three times its cost, checked with customers.

• In another unit, customers confirmed the problem, the sales team became part of the work, and the group put that team’s work forward as the example for the whole organisation.

• A third team built the unit’s first business case with real financial figures in it.

• One unit adopted the customer letter as its standard way to start any new feature.

• Even a unit dealing with a major go-live and a lot of firefighting still produced two business cases.

The bigger change was in the people. Several product managers who had run projects as they were told started acting like product managers: taking the initiative, asking what the customer needed, and pushing their ideas forward.