Product Management is about customer obsession! Think everything from customer perspective, not just from Engineering or Feature perspective. This is even more important for Healthcare Industry. There are some impeccable companies creating software to deliver outstanding solutions, but there are some who struggle to understand customers’ true needs from solution perspective and always think only from feature perspective. Here is a solution to leapfrog the thinking and make the product development truly customer-centric. I call this Capability-driven Product Development. I will show in this article how a company could get there!
Siloed Product Development Model:
More often than not, Product Roadmaps are envisioned and Products are developed with features that are targeted for specific market segments. Product Managers do an outstanding job in Market research and understanding custom needs and pain points. However, the important problem could be that these Products from a same company are often developed in silos. And different features are released to the market at different times. The following diagram describes that development model. The Product Leadership tries to align the Roadmaps very well, but it’s not uncommon to see some Products’ features dangling around in the market i.e. they need manual work-flows to deliver a complete solution because their dependent features from other products are not fully baked or released.
But, as described briefly above, Customers don’t need Products and features. They need solutions. They need software that is capable of addressing business needs and solving their pain points. They simply need Capabilities.
Capability-driven Product Development Model:
Product leadership and companies need to think everything from Capabilities, not features, perspective. They need to put customers and their capabilities right in the middle of their Product Roadmaps. Capabilities, as you could see from the diagram below, cut across multiple Products and encompass features in them. When we target releasing one capability at a time, it ensures that customers can use features from multiple Products seamlessly to meet their business needs much better than they can from the previous development model. Following this type of Roadmapping and development methodology is not that easy, and could take a lot of time to put into practice, especially if each Product belongs to a different Business Group, and so, it’s important to create Business Groups that contain Products that always go together.
Try this model and you will see happy customers. Happy customers = more revenue!