We're very familiar with the idea of ‘product management’ in the context of selling physical products to consumers, businesses or government. In more recent times we’ve also become familiar with ‘product management’ being applied to software development features through roles such as product owners. Productisation and also be applied to services and has become quite topical recently in the creative and advertising industries. But the trend towards productisation does not end there. There is an emerging trend for organisations to apply principles of product management to their own internal business services.
Defining 'Internal business services'
First of all, it’s important to consider what an internal business service is. It’s pretty much any business process or service that is undertaken or owned by internal business teams, where the consumer of those services are other internal business users or functions. This could be something as simple as gaining access to business reporting, or as complex as a detailed legal review of marketing collateral, management of contracts, or even analysing a potential M&A opportunity.
"It means that the services are clearly defined, people know how and where to ask for them, and they know what they are going to get"
The idea behind productisation of internal services is that we look at the internal services and processes we offer across our business and apply Product Thinking to break them down into well described, easy to consume services that can be delivered consistently, effectively and efficiently. It means that the services are clearly defined, people know how and where to ask for them, and they know what they are going to get.
It’s not a new concept; IT departments have been doing this for decades through the application of a widely adopted framework called ITIL (which cryptically stands for IT Infrastructure Library). ITIL applies a common frame of reference to IT services and breaks them down into well understood steps in a common lifecycle process.
How productisation fits in
Productisation can follow a similar approach to ITIL, only in a non-IT context. It's ideally suited to the introduction of new services, or improvement of services that are not working well, particularly where those services are unstructured. It’s especially useful where teams are getting overloaded with a large volume of similar requests, because it helps to improve speed and efficiency by shaping requests into a more consistent format. It can also be very helpful to make decisions about whether those requests are best fulfilled by in-house teams or picked up by a third party. This can be a lot easier to do, because productisation can clearly define the exact boundaries of services, making them more modular and suitable for outtasking if it makes sense.
As technology plays a greater role in our day-to-day jobs, it brings both a need and a capability for more consistency in process, which is perfectly suited to productisation as it both enables the productisation process, and benefits from the structure that Product Thinking brings. Â
This move towards more rigorous business process and productisation is also very well suited to the application of automation tools such as AI and Machine Learning. AI tools can manage the request process so that requests can be funnelled into the right business service using natural language and intelligent prompts. This can bring consistency to requests, which further helps us to productise the delivery process. We can then further apply automation of the delivery process itself. This self reinforcing process can greatly reduce cost and increase speed, while allowing your team to focus on the more complex and human oriented challenges which can bring much greater value to internal business teams.
"Good product management is always about thinking how we can best apply the right mix of people, process, data, and tools to best solve customer problems."
A mindset change is the first step
To achieve this step change in business performance we need to change our mindset about internal business services. We need to move away from a bureaucratic mindset where internal user requests are ‘managed’, to one that is more aligned with how we serve our external clients. Good product management is always about thinking how we can best apply the right mix of people, process, data, and tools to best solve customer problems. By applying Product Thinking to internal business processes, we can improve consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness. At the same time, we can improve our internal customer experience, which makes for a much more satisfying workplace.
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