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Too many product owners end up doing little more than taking in and delivering new features in their organisation. This makes it easy to lose sight of what customers actually need. DNA set out to strengthen its product leadership using Nitor’s model. As a result, teams now take greater responsibility in identifying appropriate solutions.
What is a milkshake?
The first thought might be “a sweet dessert competing with other milkshakes”. However, when a major American fast-food chain studied customer behaviour, it discovered that milkshakes were typically used to help manage hunger, and that the typical buyer was a commuter driving to work. According to the research, the product served a very different purpose from what the company had assumed – with a market seven times larger than expected.
That is just one of the examples used to provoke thoughts in DNA’s renewed product leadership training, says development manager and agile coach Henri Laine. The feedback has been encouraging.
“Product owners have started to see product development in a new light and bring an active mindset to how teams should be organised. The goal is to identify the areas of work that genuinely create impact for the customer and enrich the business through that,” he says.
DNA’s new operating model for product leadership
DNA is taking its way of thinking to a radically more agile direction. Around ten years ago, the company moved away from a project-based model towards a scaled agile operating model with Nitor’s support, leading to improved transparency and predictability. Over time, however, DNA wanted to take the benefits of agile development to the next level. A key idea was to move the focus away from output thinking, where attention centres on feature deliveries and their timelines.
The company wanted to turn its agile way of working into an organisation-wide operating model. As the foundations for agile working were already in place, Nitor’s product thinking and new product leadership training offering fit together well with DNA’s goals. First and foremost, the new training has been geared towards strengthening outcome thinking, which means focusing on what kind of impact the organisation wants to create.
This means a team is not asked to “build a red button” but rather to “increase customer conversion by 20 per cent”. It is then the team’s responsibility to find the best way to achieve that goal. Nitor’s training material has received particular praise for its emphasis on product discovery.
“It directly addresses DNA’s strategic capability development needs,” says Laine.
In-house trainers know the organisation best
Three rounds of product leadership training have been completed so far. The new ideas have already been introduced to dozens of specialists working as product owners or product managers, mainly in service development.
The first round was delivered by Nitor’s product leadership experts. The following two were run internally. Alongside Henri Laine, the second trainer was lean agile coach Juha Itkonen, who had already become familiar with Nitor’s way of thinking earlier in his career. Eventually, DNA chose to license Nitor’s product leadership training programme for internal use.
Itkonen recognises that this is not a common model in training partnerships, but it has worked extremely well in DNA’s case.
“Trainers from inside the organisation know the company best. Henri and I can address internal structural challenges and propose more direct ways of challenging the way the company operates,” says Itkonen.
With externally led training, participants may come away thinking, “Interesting ideas, but that would never work here,” says Laine.
“But you have to be brutally honest about these things. We know where the silos in our own organisation reside, which means we are also in a position to influence them,” he continues.
The model proved effective and has since helped DNA strengthen teams’ decision-making authority and clarify the rights and responsibilities of product owners. Key aspects of the role include ownership, decision-making authority and the mandate to move things forward.
“Ultimately, product ownership is about who gets to decide the amount of resources invested into product development and what is expected of the end result,” Laine points out.
Always understand customer needs
Marko Setälä, Principal Consultant at Nitor, says the company’s product leadership framework was built in response to a recurring observation: many organisations focus on the amount of effort taken rather than the amount of impact created. A common reason is that the discovery work behind the product is neglected. Decisions are driven by opinions and urgency rather than customer needs and goals.
“In product leadership, we emphasise four things: goal orientation, customer centricity, context-based leadership and ownership within product teams,” Setälä explains.
In practice, development work is tied to clear goals that help determine what is worth developing. Customer and business value emerge when customers want to use a product or a feature. Context means that the people who are primed to understand customer goals, operating conditions and constraints are those whose work ties in with these areas most closely. That is why teams need the authority to find the solution that delivers the desired impact.
Close to the customer
Laine notes that the principles of product leadership fit naturally with DNA’s values and ways of working.
From an organisational perspective, this way of thinking benefits a broad segment of the workforce. That is why training based on the new model will continue in the future.
“In an ideal world, we would run this training for everyone involved in product leadership, from team-level product leaders all the way to business leadership teams and their sales organisations. But it is equally relevant to developers in agile teams,” Laine outlines.
“We want to be a telecom operator that stays close to the customer and offers high-quality, easy-to-understand services. That is why customer centricity, customer understanding and agility are all at the very core of what DNA does,” Juha Itkonen concludes.
Would you like to shift the way your organisation thinks? At Nitor, we know how to help even large organisations change course – get in touch.
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Juha Itkonen works at DNA as a Lean Agile Coach and Portfolio Manager, developing the company's agile operating model, portfolio management and product thinking. He has spent nearly five years at DNA working with product development and product management, and two decades before that in software development and software engineering research. Juha believes in product leadership, where a business-driven team that understands the customer can identify where real value is created and is given the ownership to focus boldly on exactly that.
Henri Laine works at DNA as Development Manager for processes, methods and tools, and as a Lean-Agile Coach. He started out as a software engineer, where he learned that a developer's real job is to understand what other people are trying to do and then give them the best possible tools to do it well. He has spent most of the past two decades doing exactly that: helping development teams in a range of companies solve the problems of product leadership.
Marko Setälä is an outcome-focused professional and a trusted ally of his customers from the executive suite to the team level. He leverages his expertise in product leadership, large transformations, and coaching to achieve his customers’ goals.
