From ops to product
Treating operational teams as product teams, with customers, user journeys and KPIs, so they could show the value they created.
The problem
I inherited a department of operational teams with extraordinary talent and room to do much more. But these highly technical teams struggled to explain the value they provided, both to stakeholders and to their own customers.
An operational mindset had teams thinking “we maintain X technology”. Mostly the technology was generic, like monitoring, deployment or real-time communication. Sometimes a team’s identity was tied to one vendor’s version of it. That mindset made keeping the status quo very successful. It also meant the people using the technology could be neglected, and thinking stayed inside the team’s existing walls.
How I thought about it
Treat each team as a product team. The technology is the product, and the customers are the people who use it. That flips the script: goodbye status quo, hello customer satisfaction and value creation. It also points effort where it matters: at the areas with the biggest impact on customers, not at keeping a technology running for its own sake.
What I did
We started by naming who the customers were, mapping their user journeys, and setting KPIs to measure how well each team’s technology and patterns served them. We even started doing user research, so we could hear what the data wasn’t telling us.
Results
It was very successful. Customer satisfaction went through the roof, because we focused on the areas with the biggest customer impact.
What I’d do today with AI
User research and KPI reviews were the slow, manual parts. Today I would have agents gather the feedback and track the KPIs against each journey, so the teams spend their time on the fixes. The switch in mindset is still the leader’s job; no tool does that for you.