Moving from Project to Product: What Does “Product Thinking” Actually Mean?

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Product management has become one of the hottest job titles in most organizations. Is it really that different than project management? In short, it is. And the difference is fundamental because the nature of projects and products couldn’t be more different. The more an organization can embrace a product mindset, the more agility that organization exhibits, the better they can sense and respond. Let’s take a deeper look.
 

Project vs Product -- 3 ways to reframe your mindset

Projects end. Products are continuous. 

In traditional project management we usually work towards a fixed scope. There’s a clear deliverable at the end of the project and once it is handed over to the client or customer, the project is over. The team celebrates and moves on to the next initiative. Their responsibilities are effectively over for this project. The measure of success in this instance is the successful delivery of the project in a way that works as it was designed.
 

Is that the optimal solution? Does it provide real value to the users of that solution? Does it achieve the goals of the business that sponsored it? Generally speaking, this is not the responsibility of the team that built that project nor the project manager who drove it to its successful launch.
 

In contrast, products are continuous systems. Defined explicitly: products are the way an organization delivers and captures value. They don’t have an end. Products are never done. For example, when is Amazon done? When is a bank done? When is your hair stylist done delivering their service? When we view our work as a product we realize that delivering the components of that product are not the measures of its success. They are the continuous evolution (and hopefully improvement) of that product. Our goal when we approach our work with a product mindset is not to celebrate the incremental and iterative deliveries of features, functionalities and improvements but rather their outcomes -- the measurable changes in the behavior of the people who consume those products.
 

Delivering an output is designed to be an ongoing, uneventful part of building continuous products. Instead of celebrating each output, we focus on the outcomes we seek to generate to tell us whether this product is worth any more investment or effort.
 

Projects are linear. Products are circular. 

Because projects end, they have a linear planning process. We work from one phase to the next, handing off our work to the next discipline in the production chain. We ask each discipline to estimate their levels of effort and we put together a linear project plan or roadmap. Our goal is predictability and consistency. We often don’t account for variability or new discoveries because we want to provide a confident answer to the question, “When will it be done?”
 

Products continuously evolve and, as mentioned above, don’t have a specific “end” when they’re conceived. They’re designed to deliver value on an ongoing basis. As new feedback comes in from the use of the product, the team must respond to that feedback and adjust their plans based on this new information. The entire basis for Agile as the new way of working is based on this idea. As an organization learns new things (senses) about its product it adjusts how it responds to those things. The plan changes. The organization and therefore the product exhibit agility. This is critical to success in today’s rapid change environment. Product thinking ensures that our plans stay as agile as our products.
 

Projects are components. Products are systems. 

The continuous delivery of new ideas to market is where projects shine. But these deliveries are simply components of the overall system, the product. Each component may or may not deliver real value to the consumer and the business. Product teams optimize their ways of working to sense as quickly as possible whether this value is being delivered and realized and, if not, to adjust the planning and the system accordingly.
 

Why is this important? Because the consumers of our products are inevitably going to be other people. And these other people, we’re sorry to say, are almost always unpredictable. They don’t use the products as we imagined. They struggle to complete tasks we thought were simple. They abandon our products for seemingly more difficult or “older” tools because of familiarity. Our responsibility as product thinkers is to connect with our customers, understand these pain points and challenges and adjust our product planning to reflect the insights we gain from these conversations.
 

This insight is what allows us to plan the next set of components (mini projects) we want to introduce into the system (the product) remembering that our goal isn’t the deployment of these new components but rather the successful alleviation of the challenges the humans who use our products told us they were having with it.
 

Project managers looking to increase the agility of their teams and to build more of a product mindset in the way they work need to consider these 3 elements of product thinking. In addition, they need to carefully adjust the tools they’ve been using to match this new reality. The tools and methods we use for planning need to embrace agility and reflect that in the work project managers produce. Agile roadmaps provide guidance and direction but can’t commit to fixed time and scope, since it is unknown in a continuous system. The needs of the people we serve are continuously changing which requires today’s project managers to learn how to assess these evolving needs on a regular basis through regular customer interviews. Finally, the needs of the product teams will evolve as well. The tools, data, insight and feedback they require will morph as the product system evolves. As a project manager, it’s your responsibility to empathize with the evolving needs of your team so they can do their best work as well.
 

We have many more articles coming up on how to do these new activities and they are all part of the online course we’re building and launching soon right here with PMI. Learn more and sign up here.