Digital Transformation Game Plan

Chapter 15. Products over Projects

In the IT industry today, there is a significant movement toward thinking about (and managing) software assets as though they were products. A typical product has customers who derive value from the product; long-lived teams that envision, create, evolve, and market the product; and a life cycle that includes retiring products when they cease to be market worthy. You might already have heard the advice to “think about products instead of projects.” This chapter dives into greater detail on this concept, how you can apply it to alter the way you think about and fund software assets, and how all of this relates to a focus on customer value and delivering via thin slices.

Defining Product Thinking

Throughout this book we’ve used the word “product” with various different nuances. At the time of this writing (toward the end of the book production process) there are several hundred instances of “product” in our manuscript and many references to “product teams.” Clearly, something about the word product is important to our story; this chapter goes into depth on what we mean when we say “product” and what we mean by product thinking.

Product thinking comes from the hyperactive Silicon Valley startup world in which everyone has a money-making idea. The process of taking an idea, shaping it into a business, and shooting for a billion-dollar valuation has been honed and refined over the past two decades. The Valley’s success has been imitated around the ...