A thought struck me the other day about the difference between Operational excellence and Product excellence that made me think ... just a little obviously :-)
Just as well as Product Managers needs to balance "doing the right things" vs "doings things right" they also need to understand the difference between "Efficient" and "Effective" which is basically a different view of the same balance.
Effective refers to the Commercial aspect of making sure your product solves an actual need for the customer. But this also involves an understanding of how the product offering affects the operational excellence of the customers business - how Efficient your product is.
Efficient is about ensuring that the product offerings are not only feasible, but are feasible in a way that is cost effective and optimized. Not understanding how product design affects profitability by carefully considering operational excellence as part of PM excellence can jeopardize your P&L. Actually this is one of the core reasons PMs should have P&L responsibility for their offerings. How would your otherwise keep PM accountable for both sides of this complex equation?
So maybe one of the core links between Operational Excellence and Product Excellence can be derived from the End2End model described in my previous posts (go see, please). Operational excellence is about optimizing the "production" (Operations) of your Product. But all optimization efforts must also begin with the customer experience in mind, just as Product Excellence begins with the customer experience. Bear in mind that some of the primary touchpoints with your product lies in the "Daily Operations" phase of the End2End model (again please refer to previous posts). Hopefully your customer will spend a considerable amount of time in this phase with your product, which implies that the PM - you - must carefully design these touchpoints into the Product during development. I will even postulate that there does not have to be a contradiction between optimizing the operational aspects of your product and at the same time optimizing the user experience as long as you begin your optimization efforts with a careful analysis of the user experience.
... again we're back to one of the core insights for the PM - that everything you do with your product must begin and end with a deep insight into the experiences your customer has with your product. In reality a fairly obvious point, but according to my experience not very well implemented in most PM organizations.
What are your experiences - are your PM team fully aligned with the customers experience of your product(s)?
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