Overview

Charles River Laboratories aimed to enhance its product management practices and foster better team alignment. To meet these objectives, Productside delivered a tailored Optimal Product Management course featuring custom exercises designed to tackle the company’s unique challenges. This engagement resulted in high satisfaction among participants and measurable improvements in their skills.

Background

Charles River Laboratories is a global leader in providing essential products and services in drug discovery, development, and manufacturing. Since its founding in 1947, the company has supported life sciences clients with a broad product portfolio, including research models, preclinical testing, and various clinical laboratory services. Over the years, Charles River has expanded through strategic acquisitions, positioning itself as a comprehensive early-stage contract research organization (CRO).

The Challenge

The organization faced multiple challenges, including difficulty in prioritizing projects aligned to business objectives, role clarity, and communicating a product vision. The team was staffed by great people who were domain experts that transitioned into product management, but without formal training. There was also no established product process and this had downstream effects such as inefficient stakeholder management and delays in the product development processes that hindered progress.

A Partner for Change

Charles River chose Productside for their expertise in product management and custom training programs. The goal was to create a training program that encouraged transparency, improved stakeholder communication, aligned product teams, and ultimately drove better business outcomes. Productside’s ability to customize training exercises to the needs of their company was crucial in addressing the specific challenges faced by the Charles River team.

In working with the team leader, the Productside consultant identified additional issues such as poor interdepartmental communication and reliance on outdated practices that conflicted with the company’s digital transformation goals. Inefficient stakeholder management further prevented the team from identifying issues early, hampering the achievement of business objectives and creating more rework. These insights contributed to the customization of the training program.

The Solution

Productside ran a skills assessment to find where additional skill gaps were on the team. The consultant developed a customized Optimal Product Management course tailored to Charles River Laboratories, focusing on key gaps such as pricing, forecasting, and prioritization. Custom exercises kept participants engaged, while additional takeaway resources, including worksheets for pricing prioritization and the DACI framework for stakeholder collaboration, facilitated the practical application of lessons learned.

A Success

The results were overwhelmingly positive, with 100% of participants agreeing or strongly agreeing that they gained new skills to apply in their roles, earning an overall satisfaction score of 4.75/5. The exercises and takeaways provided actionable steps that participants could implement immediately. Productside also ran skills assessments after the training . On average skill areas improved 19.2% over the baseline assessment. For the biggest skill gaps, Pricing improved 38%, Forecasting by 37.5%, and Product Process increased 31.25%. While there were still improvements to be made in skill areas such as Communication, the team had taken a big step forward on their Product Management Maturity!

Conclusion

If your organization is facing challenges with stakeholder management or aligning product priorities with business goals, discover how partnering with Productside can drive better outcomes. Let’s do Product, Better. Contact us to learn how.

The post Charles River Laboratories Success Story: Training on Product Process with Productside appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

• Challenge: Establish a strong foundation of the Product Management practices to increase growth and profitability. 
• Solution: Redesigned the product management organization by establishing product management practices and leveraging Productside Optimal Product Management Course to train the team on Product Management. 
• Outcome: The Product Management team has become more strategic, data-driven, interacts directly with customers, prioritizes according to market needs, and has a focused market-driven new product roadmap with highly improved forecasting. 

A privately owned manufacturer of chromatography consumables and reference standards for the analytical instruments industry had grown successfully for over 30 but was experiencing some growing pains. Amid expanding direct operations globally and instituting global systems to harmonize processes, competition was intensifying, and core products were trending toward commoditization. With SKUs numbering in the tens of thousands and a complex pricing structure, the product management function became internally focused trying to help the other departments rather than understanding unmet needs in the market and building for the future.  The company’s leadership was concerned with the slowing growth and sought to make a change in the product management organization.

Russ Ulbrich joined them as Vice President of Product Management and realized quickly that the company needed a structured approach for managing products and making decisions. He audited the current state and found out that the team had an unmanageable number of ongoing projects, gaps in their stage-gate process, overlapping roles and responsibilities across departments, and no consistent plan in place for launching new products.

He said: “The teams were very tactical. It’s a consumables company with a tremendous number of SKUs to manage. The team’s time was completely consumed with the tactical day-to-day activities trying to help keep the business moving and address burning fires. None of the product managers had time to be strategic or visit customers.“ 

Although growing, growth slowed in the face of changing market dynamics. The organization was siloed with lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities around portfolio management. There was no clear “owner” of the new product roadmap. New product ideas were flowing in from all directions including sales, business development, product management and R&D. The company’s market data was old and VOC was incomplete. There was a lack of interdepartmental coordination and alignment and no rigorous vetting of ideas. This approach resulted in an unmanageable large list of projects with no clear understanding of market impact or priority and the lack of aligned marketing plans. The pace of new product introductions slowed dramatically and when products were launched, accuracy of forecasts was extremely volatile which complicated planning in operations. This approach was simply no longer working.

Building the Foundation

Russ understood that he was on a mission to change how the company made decisions. Russ says: “Strategy is a fancy word … but really, strategy is simply about making decisions. It’s about understanding where you play and where your opportunity is.” 

He knew he had to change the way his team operated- from how they collected market research, to how they made tradeoffs between projects. To implement a product management approach, he started by:  

• Restructuring teams: The business managers were retitled as product managers and given a new strategic role in understanding the market, not just executing orders. 

• Building knowledge: Implementing monthly training sessions on product management fundamentals.  

• Modernizing road mapping: Establishing a process to evaluate and prioritize projects based on market insights. 

Initially, Russ led all the monthly training sessions: he is a true lifelong learner and always believed that-“You can’t be a product manager if you’re not passionate about learning. You’ve got to constantly learn.” He created a book club to introduce his team to the principles of strategy and product management. Initially, he saw many improvements in their strategic thinking and approach to monetization. However, he knew that for the team to start behaving differently, he needed to bring in an additional resource: “I wanted the team to hear somebody other than me talk about what product management was – someone outside of the organization, and a professional product management training organization to show them how all the pieces fit.” 

Bringing in a Partner for Change

Russ’s goal was to train the team on end-to-end product management process so that they can identify customer centric problems, communicate more effectively across marketing and sales teams and make better trade off decisions that drove revenue growth and profitability.

Russ wanted to bring in a partner who could augment his efforts in teaching the product management team and help them apply these concepts in a learning environment. Russ selected Productside to work with on this mission. He liked the practical approach of our Optimal Product Management course and that there was a balance between discovery and delivery. Productside also matched Russ with an expert that had a background in manufacturing and digital products. The Productside pro customized the course for their company culture and was able to provide actionable feedback on how to take concepts and apply them directly on the job.

Results and Impact

Productside’s trainer delivered the customized Optimal Product Management course to Russ’ team’s level and needs. After the training was completed, the entire class surveyed indicated they had learned new skills and would recommend both the course and the instructor to their colleagues. One respondent also appreciated that “the entire team is working with the same tools now.”

Russ also questioned his team for feedback about the training course and heard: “The training that you gave us was more meaningful than any training that I’ve ever had at this company: it was structured. It was applied.” Russ agreed that “The Productside training took concepts and then had a conversation about how we could apply it and start making it our own…Having a course like yours was critical to get that foundation in product management to where they could start thinking differently. And different concepts resonated with each of the team.”

In the end the hard work that truly transformed this manufacturer’s product organization was done by Russ and his team. They redefined roles and responsibilities, standardized the way they managed products, and implemented a stage gate process that helped their focus and ability to prioritize. Their investment in training enabled them to move much faster on this change curve and address blind spots of their initial efforts. They also could rely on an additional expert to help close any remaining gaps along the way. The impact of these changes was seen across the organization- from increased trust and credibility from their stakeholders to much more accurate revenue and profitability projections.

This story is common- many companies have successfully grown over the years with a relentless focus on the individual customer. The transition to focus on the market is hard yet fundamentally important to scale operations. Training is a powerful tool in service of great product leaders who want to equip their teams with the tools and frameworks to do better work and shift their mindset. A customized course on product management built on practical frameworks and tailored to the company culture and process, is the fastest way to boost the capability of a team to drive business performance and recharge growth.

Do you have similar challenges? Are you looking to improve your ability to drive business results? Get in touch with Productside now!

The post Leading Strategic Market-driven Growth Through the Evolution of Product Management appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

• Client: Privately Owned, Healthcare Business and Data Automation Company
• Location: Global
• Industry: Healthcare
• Goal: Implement consistent product process to enable more strategic product teams and executive alignment

Key Benefits Achieved

Established a standardized Executive Review Board process that enables visibility and alignment on product decisions with executives.

Assembled a Product Operations group to run the new process and ensure key deliverables were implemented consistently, creating a clearer strategic vision.

Enabled Product Managers to be more strategic by self-managing their OKRs and KPls tuned to their new process.

Background

On a mission for an operationally efficient healthcare supply chain, our Healthcare Data Automations client enabled healthcare organizations to improve patient care and maximize industry savings through their world-class, cloud-based supply chain technology exchange platforms, solutions, analytics, and services. Their ability to advance patient care for 5,000+ providers and cut billions in spending each year made them an asset to the healthcare community. This company’s customers rely on the platform’s secure healthcare-focused technology and comprehensive data to automate their business processes and to make more informed, timely, and fact-based decisions.

Thanks to their efforts in maximizing automation, efficiency, and accuracy of business processes, they have transformed how data automation is used in healthcare. For this company, inorganic growth through acquisition was an integral part of the growth strategy to scale and continue providing better solutions for healthcare organizations. But like any business undertaking an increasing number of acquisitions with multiple executives and teams across various business units, the resulting organization can be siloed and left working with fragmented product processes and strategies.

The Challenge

As each new acquisition was completed, the client grappled with diverse development teams using different tools and practices. Each addition created more business units that leveraged their unique process rather than working within an established standard. The lack of standardized methods and a cohesive culture on product strategy inhibited their ability to deliver innovative products aligned with business objectives on time or within budget.

To complicate matters further, they had no clear vision to lean on to influence product development and no unified means of supervising and formulating a product strategy that the executives could leverage to guide the company’s future. Where a product strategy did exist, it reflected incremental and innovative thinking from dozens of Product Managers, all working on individual projects that didn’t necessarily align with the company’s business goals and initiatives.

As each team was left to determine their preference for handling releases autonomously, products were incremental and often shipped late. The client saw their efforts driving up costs and putting the company at a competitive disadvantage. Additionally, the lack of consistent processes and stakeholder alignment led to increased stress on the team, taking a toll on employee morale.

After working with several consulting firms, problems persisted as these challenges proved difficult to tackle. The client sought a final partner who could work across the various executives and teams to create a more strategic and aligned product management function: Productside.

The Solution

As part of our commitment to drive, transform, and enable strong product management teams, Productside creates fully customized consulting engagements to improve outcomes in the unique needs of every client. The client chose Productside for our deep Product Management expertise, our commitment to becoming a long-term, trusted partner, and the proven success held with other large companies facing similar challenges.

As the client continued to expand through acquisition, it was essential to implement structure and best practices to guide the product development process and help Product Managers develop products that would drive the business forward while getting the executives aligned.

The company’s Chief Product Officer (CPO) had experienced the successes of a more strategic Product Management function, and he wanted to reflect that in this organization. To do so would require introducing just enough process to align and aim, but not so much as to burden the organization. The result would make Product Managers strategic, proactive, and responsible.

With the CPO’s sights on upping the game, Productside determined the need to first train the U.S. and EMEA teams on a shared vision of strategic Product Management. In collaboration with Productside, a plan was developed to:

• Define their incremental (1.x) and innovative (MVP) products using a modified Lean Canvas to include OKRs and KPIs tuned to their process.
• Determine a means for executives to have insight into product decisions and assurance that the product strategy was aligned to business goals.
• Increase the confidence of the Product Managers in their ability to adhere to deadlines and plans.

Productside first trained the client’s Product Managers on The Optimal Product Process™ to align teams on a shared framework of phases and corresponding activities that each product should move through. Once adopted, teams better understood the importance of gates and how to advance their products to the next phase of the process, creating better visibility and alignment on product progress and goals.

Next, the teams learned to leverage one-page product proposal templates that provide an executive summary of a project, including objectives, customer impact, risk factors, and clearly defined boundaries such as KPls/OKRs and the target introduction date.

Productside also implemented an Executive Review Board on the Phase/Gate process — a product review process in which Product Managers communicate their project’s status and seek approval for their next steps. For Product Managers, this process focuses on outcomes, rather than outputs, to drive the success of their product in the market and ensure quality decisions are made to help achieve business goals. The review process provided executives with clear objectives and boundaries outlined in a simple proposal, so they could make rapid decisions about which projects to support based on their feasibility and alignment with the overall roadmap and corporate goals.

A Partner for Transformation

Over five months, Productside:

• Trained every product professional with a Product Management title within the client’s initial kick-off teams, and additional stakeholders in Sales, Marketing, and Finance on The Optimal Product Management™ process.
• Ran 3-day workshops to organize product roadmap items and develop multiple one-pager executive summaries for key products.
• Executed an 8-hour integration with executives and performed a sample Phase/Gate exercise. We presented four projects and explained the roles and responsibilities of executives, Product Managers, and others for this part of the product development process.

The comprehensive training kicked off a cultural evolution, putting in place a repeatable and effective Product Management process for defining, developing, and executing a Product strategy. Additionally, the client:

• Established a regular cadence for Executive Review Boards around the Phase/Gate process, enabling executives to provide feedback.
• Assembled a Product Operations group to run the Phase/Gate meetings and ensure the process and one-page proposal summaries are implemented consistently.
• Required Product Managers to self-manage to OKRs/KPIs using the one-page summaries.
• This approach holds Product Managers accountable to be more strategic while giving all stakeholders a voice.

The Results

As a result of our engagement with the client, Product Managers are now supported In their efforts to deliver products that satisfy real customer problems, drive the business, and ship on time. The teams reported feeling more in-tuned to their customer’s needs in their practice to produce deliverables such as empathy interviews and persona builds. In addition, instating an effective review process to generate stakeholder alignment and buy-in on projects improved the team’s confidence to produce meaningful products.

According to the client’s Vice President of Product, Productside helped the company accomplish what other consultants couldn’t. “We had previously worked with McKinsey and PwC, trying to get our Product Management team to be more strategic, but nothing worked,” he said. “Productside was able to provide the output we needed, giving executives the right level of oversight and control over product development without heeding the progress and innovation of the Product organization.”

The client’s engagement partner, Productside Principal Consultant and Trainer Ken Feehan, remarked, “At each check-in with the client’s VP of Product, I can see the organization evolving. I see Product Managers building products that customers want to buy AND driving the execution of product development and the product launch to success. I also see their executives from around the company finally involved in product strategy decisions. It’s exciting to see these big wins and their impact to achieve the success they were reaching for.”

Do you want to achieve this kind of long-term success for your Product Management organization? Contact us to learn how.

The post Healthcare Growth: Strategic Training Drives Culture Shift appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

• Challenge: Improve the process of forecasting, planning, and developing digital supply chain solutions to meet evolving needs of internal clients.
• Impact: Created an inventory claims management application used by thousands that drives significant cash flow recovery for Jabil.
• Outcome: Adopted Product Management and Agile development processes and created a foundation and common playbook for efficient application development.

Jabil’s Journey to Working Smarter and More Efficiently after Customized Training with Productside

Productside had the opportunity to work with the Digital Supply Chain Solutions team at Jabil, a global manufacturing services company. Our job as teachers and advisors is to provide knowledge and tools, but our clients are the ones who build the products that matter — products that customers love and achieve breakthrough business results. After starting the path of investing in skill and process building, this Product group at Jabil overcame the trepidation of transformation to become a high-performing team, delivering significant efficiencies and cash flow savings every quarter. This is their story.

Primed for Change

Jabil is one of the world’s largest contract manufacturers, with over 260,000 employees spanning the globe and more than $27 Billion in annual revenue. The company’s client base spans multiple technology-forward sectors, including Healthcare, Consumer Electronics, and Defense and Aerospace. Many of the world’s leading brands work with Jabil, including Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson. Jabil’s tagline, “Made Possible, Made Better,” underscores its success in being a forward-thinking manufacturing company and applying innovative technologies to generate value for clients.

Supply chain efficiency is one of the most important performance indicators for a manufacturing solutions company. Inefficient component and material purchasing is one of its major operational risks. According to Jabil’s annual report, “A shortage of components or an increase in price could interrupt our operations and reduce our profit, increase our inventory carrying costs, increase our risk of exposure to inventory obsolescence and cause us to purchase components of a lesser quality.”

To mitigate such risk, Jabil’s Digital Supply Chain Solutions team created an innovative solution to improve the company’s excess and obsolescent inventory claims management system, using advanced machine learning techniques. Led at the time by Simon Yannopoulos, the team then applied this technology to look forward, analyzing roadmaps to predict when a certain technology or part may become “obsolete.” Identifying such risks proactively ensures Jabil and its clients continue to manufacture the best technology and products, reducing these risks and costs while improving efficiency.

Yannopoulos knows the mission critical role his team plays- both when they succeed, and when they don’t. Just a few years prior, the team felt the pain of attempting to launch a highly innovative platform but was ultimately unsuccessful.

“There was a lot of frustration on my team,” he recalled. “There was distinct lack of visibility and engagement with no clarity on timing or feature priority, making it extremely difficult to forecast and plan for releases. The planning cycle was about as accurate as throwing darts at a board.”

Yannopoulos added that the lack of clarity around roles and priorities was also affecting the team’s efficiency and ability to deliver a product that their customers would love and find useful. Rather than ignoring what was wrong in their process and continuing the status quo, Yannopoulos made the launch failure a catalyst for change. He looked to bring on an external partner to help navigate them back on track.

A Proven Partner with a Plan

He took steps to find a product management expert team that could train his group on a proven product management framework that could be customized for Jabil’s industry and met the following requirements:

• Provided a solid foundation in product management and Agile practices
• Clarified team roles and responsibilities
• Explained how to operate an effective planning cycle, forecast, and develop a product roadmap for success

Simon selected to work with Productside due to their expert product management staff and emphasis on building customized training programs for their clients. Productside then created a customized Optimal Product Management class, incorporating concepts from the Agile Product Management course, along with relevant and actionable content. Years later, Simon’s team is still invigorated by the changes they were able to make after the training and the value they are now producing for Jabil and their customers.

Continuous Learning, Role Clarity, Retrospectives

While their training with Productside helped lay the foundation and frarmework for Optimal Product Management practices, three additional factors contributed to the success of Simon’s team: commitment to continuous learning, role clarity, and retrospectives.

Commitment to Continuous Learning and Discipline

Yannopoulos remembers many lightbulo moments during the Productside course. “We went through a classroom exercise of writing basic user stories, and most of us thought, ‘Man, we suck at this!” he said. “It highlighted moments of reflection and presented genuine opportunities to grow and develop our skills as a product team.” The team’s commitment to learning and welcoming new ideas was key to the success that followed. “Although we didn’t get great at writing user stories right away, we began to use each sprint as a learning opportunity to get better and stay on course.”

Yannopoulos added, “When trying something new there are so many opportunities to take what feels like the easy path and abandon new ideas and processes. You really have to commit to continuous learning. Although painful at first, we’ve started to get really good at it we can now predict pretty closely what we’re going to produce at the end of a sprint.”

“User Stories” Market Requirements

Typically used in Agile
Short description of user need focused on goal or benefit
Not a technical description or design statement
Guides conversation
Large user stories called epics

Simon acknowledged that his role as a leader was to support his team in the learning.

“I didn’t expect perfection right away, but I did require diligence and hard work,” he said. “Before taking the Productside course, I made sure that my team was ready to embrace the hard learning and commit to making a change.”

As part of the training, Productside Trainer Rick Bess had Yannopoulos’s team write down their commitments and next steps before leaving the classroom. But it was Simon’s role as the leader to make sure they stayed the course. “I’m glad we all committed to do this together,” he said. “It’s typical for people to complete a course but fail to apply what they learned. You have to make a commitment to follow through.”

Role Clarity and Team Structure

A common root cause of team dysfunction at any company is lack of role clarity and structure. When team members are not aligned on their respective areas of responsibility, confusion ensues, delaying decisionmaking, and resulting in poor hand offs and low accountability. Making deliberate decisions about team structure and getting other departments on the same page speeds decision-making, and enables teams to align on strategic priorities.

“When we first went through our training with Productside, we knew we all needed to get into the product management mindset. We needed to understand how we drive the process, how we build and market our product, and more. Since taking the class, we have become far more specialized, we assign product owners to manage the entirety of an application, and another team member to act as the Customer Advocate and handle the storyboarding, roadmaps, enhancement requests, and all other customer-facing engagement. This enables the product owner to be more engaged with the development cycle and engineering team. It took us d good amount of time to understand where we wanted to be on that Agile spectrum, and we overcorrected until we determined how to be most effective. We learned that you have to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable — and there are always opportunities to improve.”

Roles in Agile

For Yannopoulos’s team, the role of product owner was played by the product manager. But several important customer-facing activities were supported by this new team member, the Customer Advocate, who also has product manager responsibilities. In the end, what matters is that all of the critical functions of the roles are covered, and that everyone on the various teams agree to and understand these responsibility assignments and maintain accountability.

For Yannopoulos, clarifying roles and responsibilities on his team was an important step in reducing friction. It forced the team to recognize what they were responsible for, and what they were not responsible for. “Most of us come from technical backgrounds — all of us have written code at one point in our careers,” he said. “So, when we wanted to communicate a user story..sometimes it was very hard to stay on our side of the line without jumping in and saying, here’s the diagram, this is the architecture, and this is how you should do it. We had to learn how to let go of some things and give our engineers the freedom to evolve and design things the way they thought best.”

Learning the importance of staying “in their lane” was crucial to the team’s growth. Not only had it been difficult for product and development teams to get on the same page, the process was especially slow because the teams worked in different time zones which could compound delays. Today, it’s a different story. “Refinement is like a rapid-fire interview,” Yannopoulos said. “Everyone’s already read the story and has their own list of questions. They hammer the product manager for five minutes then proceed to estimate the story, which decreases cycle time.” Role clarity helps build cohesion on the team as well as efficiencies. This also frees up the product manager to spend their precious time better understanding customer needs.

Benefits aside, Simon agrees that the work of role clarity is never done. As a leader, he takes opportunities to communicate the important work his team does with the organization at large and encourages his team to include slides explaining their roles and functions when presenting to other teams and to leadership. “People engaged in our ‘day in the life’ discussions and were surprised to learn the scope of our work,” he said. “We definitely need to do a better job of communicating what it means to have that role within the organization.”

Evangelizing the role has helped shine a light on the work his team is doing. Simon frequently invites peers working on other products to join his teams’ standups, demos, retrospectives, and other ceremonies so they can ask about roles, responsibilities, structure, and so on. “We show them how we write our user stories now, and | think the depth and detail of stories blow people away.”

Retrospectives – How to Write Mind-blowing User Stories

Commitment to learning matters just as much as how you choose to do it. In Yannopoulos’s case, retrospectives proved to be one of the most important tools for transforming his team.

Team members spent a significant amount of time in the retrospective at the end of each sprint cycle. “Retrospectives were really key,” he said. “We learned how to improve processes and take action items, then measure the results of the improvements.”

Retrospectives are built into the Agile process, but most teams don’t invest enough time to make them effective. There is a level of discomfort in admitting mistakes and acknowledging that 4 process was not optimal. For Yannopoulos’s team, writing great user stories took a significant amount of time and effort and iteration, so they leveraged the Retrospective and the refinement process to get better and more efficient every cycle. “It took discipline to get good at it,” he said. “We had numerous conversations around how to do subtasks. Do we change how we’re doing story estimation? Do we ditch story points altogether or replace it? We have a lot of work at the front-end to make sure that the user story is easy to hand over to the engineering team. It’s not perfect; there are still questions, but there are far fewer questions now than when we first started.”

Just like debriefs, postmortems, or even pre-mortems, Retrospectives can be a powerful catalyst for learning and improvement. However, it takes work and commitment from team leaders to build in real time for this process and to always strive to do it better. No matter how uncomfortable the first one is, it too will get better with practice.

Evolution to Success

The team’s first application is now ramping up in adoption across the organization — a single source of truth for how Jabil performs the excess and obsolescence claims management process. “The application frees up significant cash flow each and every quarter with a few thousand users,” Yannopoulos said. “It’s bigger than we thought it would be and the benefits are bigger, as well. How we worked together laid the foundation for how we build our next apps, which are now about to be released.”

According to Yannopoulos, the team’s journey began with a first step -— getting a good baseline Understanding, and the education they needed to operate from a common playbook. “As a leader, it’s incredibly rewarding to see the team evolve and reach new heights,” he said. “When your team members grow their skills and reach far more of their potential — it’s fantastic to see. Ultimately it translates to far greater value for the team and the company.”

We agree.

Do you want to achieve this kind of long-term success for your Product Management organization? Contact us to learn how.

The post Manufacturing Transformation: Cash Flow Boost with Custom Training appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

A large healthcare insurance agency founded more than 150 years ago and known for being an industry innovator was facing a number of challenges.

The Affordable Care Act had changed the landscape of health insurance, and this company was one of several insurance companies that suffered significant losses with ACA-compliant products in 2016. While profitability improved in 2017, the organization realized it needed to transform from a health insurance company to a healthcare company.

The Challenge

The company had a massive portfolio of products that were hard for customers to understand and were not differentiated sufficiently from one another — or from competitive offerings. As with many companies, the organization’s Product Managers often built whatever Sales requested, adding plan options to an already extensive portfolio. Products weren’t developed to align with overall company goals or desired business outcomes. What’s more, products that required process or software changes would go through a lengthy review and development process that slowed down time to market. Even worse, there was no consistent process to follow to identify customer problems, market size and situation, or potential for profitability.

The lack of consistent processes was compounded by inconsistent skill levels across teams, and a lack of understanding about the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager. The organization needed to incorporate more innovation into its product process, but the Product Managers lacked the expertise they
needed to move forward.

In support of becoming a healthcare company, the recently hired VP of Product Management set out to build a set of products aligned to achieve the company’s aggressive goals. To do this would require a dramatic change in product management.

Finding the Right Partner

The VP of Product Management formed a small team who’s goal was to build a world-class product management team that could better identify real customer needs. The team would use “whole product thinking” to build new products that solved customer problems, by providing not just health insurance but healthcare services. They were tasked with refining the product portfolio to reduce confusion and differentiate products from the competition.

To achieve those goals, the team needed a partner that would help them:

• Refine the new product management process to incorporate more best practices and customize the process to work effectively.
• Clearly define roles and responsibilities for Product Managers and all of their stakeholder groups, so that everyone could work toward achieving common goals.
• Establish a common language for how Product Managers and their cross-functional teams operate across the company’s many different groups and divisions for more efficiency and synergy.
• Increase and up-level the skill sets of Product Managers, many of whom come from diverse backgrounds, such as business analysts, project managers, business develooment managers, IT services managers, and solution partners.
• Increase the confidence of the company’s Product Managers in their ability to tackle current challenges and achieve their strategic goals.

After an extensive evaluation, the company chose Productside to deliver this training based on our ability to customize training to meet their needs, our deep product management expertise, and our commitment to become a long-term, trusted partner.

The Discovery Process

Productside assigned a strategic consultant to work with a subject matter expert (SME) and PM Excellence Champion at the client organization. This consultant took the time needed to understand the company’s needs, study its existing processes and tools, and research the state of its market challenges. Productside’s consultant worked closely with the client to review the course syllabus together, identify areas to expand or modify, and tailor the course to the organization’s specific needs.

Once a draft was completed, the organization was given the opportunity to review the new syllabus and the updated exercises and identify areas in which examples specific to the healthcare industry would be particularly important. The client was particularly happy with this customization process. “We’ve done lots of other training classes with other vendors, and none went as smoothly or were as effective as they have been with Productside,” said the Champion.

The Solution

The client organization brought its first 25 students to the course and were very happy with the results of the customized 2-day training. Based on course feedback, the client requested the course be expanded by another half day, to allow for better pacing and provide more time for exercises and team interaction. With a quick turn, Productside was able to expand the course to meet the client’s revised scope, and the next course was on its way the next month!

After more than 150 Product Managers were trained, the client identified a second need: training those team members around the Product Managers to make product core teams more effective. Following the same customization process, Productside developed a 1-day course to introduce team members from IT, project management, business development, and marketing to the new product management process. Students in this course learned the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager, the tools and processes Product Managers follow, what to expect from a Product Manager, and how to support them in their work. This enabled core tearm members to work together more efficiently, using a common language and process.

The Results

Now in its fourth year, Productside’s partnership has helped the client achieve many of its goals:

• Reduced preliminary development planning cycles by 60%, from over 10 weeks to under 4 weeks.
• Deployed a new product management process that includes a Conceive phase for a more effective way to identify customer problems, and a Retire phase to end products that are no longer providing value.
• A clear, consistent process for using data to advance high ROI opportunities and eliminate less profitable offerings from the company’s product portfolio.
• Aligned more than 300 Product Managers and partners to the new product management process, with a clear understanding of product management roles and responsibilities.
• Established experimental processes that offer the potential for faster, cheaper product concept testing.

In working with Productside, one team leader remarked:

Do you want to achieve this kind of long-term success for your Product Management organization? Contact us to learn how.

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