Context: When I started in my current role, I inherited a team using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) operating model. I quickly realized, that this SAFe framework was creating big problems in the team. The disconnect between product management, developers and designers, interfacing almost exclusively through a technical product owner, created a textbook feature factory. Problems mounted. The ‘us vs. them mindset’ meant that building and shipping anything was painfully slow. Developers and designers were risk averse, avoiding experimentation and only concerned with shipping as many features as possible with no concern about outcomes. The unpleasant working environment resulted in high turnover - nearly all developers in a six month period during the worst time. And there was a even bigger problem: the entire operating model was incapable of supporting new product discovery. Everyone, including me, was unhappy with the situation and it was obvious a big change was needed.
Approach: During the unpleasant business above, I began reading extensively about alternative operating models. From my studies, I proposed something radical to heads of development, design, and my business unit: kill the SAFe model and adopt the Product Operating Model instead. Although everyone wanted the team setup to change, there was still hesitancy. However, all leader stakeholders agreed to support the shift. One major reason for support was that the team had ditched the SAFe model during our work on the COVID detection solution - to great effect! We thus had a clear demonstration of what change could look like.
Adopting the product operating model meant the following: implementing the cross-functional product trio setup, (see below), in which each trio works toward OKRs or KPIs directly tied to user/business outcomes. Each OKR/KPIs is owned by the entire trio, not any individual team member. Furthermore, product delivery and discovery would take place in parallel as discovering new products became a strategic imperative.
Leading a transformation: the product operating model
Impact: In my experience, most people don’t want to work in feature factories - they want meaningful work as part of a supportive team. Fortunately, one immediate impact of adopting the product operating model was a surge in team morale. People were motivated to collaborate more closely and cross-functional relationships grew stronger. The team atmosphere became much more collegial - something that I believe substantially reduced turnover.
The first big test of our new model came when developing an antibody data searching and profiling solution. Not only did our new ways of working help us create an impactful solution, but we did it much faster than our old processes would have permitted. Similarly, the product model supported not just new developments but also helped deliver strong commercial results - a significant achievement given post-pandemic disruptions to the customer and user base of our products!
Adopting and implementing the product operating model wasn’t without challenges. For example, we struggled early on to define clear areas of ownership in the product trio setup and initially tended to use OKRs as a ‘fancy KPIs’. However, my team has continued to learn and improve over time.
Aside from the impact on my team, adopting the product operating model had other impacts as well. For example, using OKRs directly influenced the rest of the business unit to adopt them. Our business unit’s success with OKRs itself contributed to OKRs being rolled out to the entire organization. I’m grateful my team’s experiences and results played a part in this ongoing organizational transformation, especially as the product operating model itself directly correlates with successful, high-impact product functions.
Successfully adopting and implementing the product operating model is one of my biggest achievements. Reading about change management is one thing, but it’s another thing entirely to actually do it.
Context: After some changes in the C-Suite, I received an explicit mandate from senior leadership to launch new products, which was both exciting and daunting. One reason for adopting the product operating model (see above) was to accelerate new product development - a key strategy for transformational business growth. An ecosystem of markets meant there were many opportunity spaces to explore. However, while the product operating model gave my team a good foundation, we still needed methods for new product discovery. We needed tools to rapidly test and assess ideas for product-market fit.
Accelerating product discovery
Approach: The first step was surveying various product discovery methodologies. I myself stumbled on and recommended Opportunity Solution Trees (see below). Others proposed the Confidence Meter and ICE (Impact-Confidence-Ease) scoring for prioritization. With these frameworks and a stockpile of testing methods, I could guide the product team’s efforts to assess the Four Big Risks of product development: desirability, usability, feasibility, and viability. Commercial viability is of particular importance since any product ideas must also deliver business success. Establishing evidence-based product discovery processes, based on multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, gave us a foundation to dive in with rapid research and testing. Another key element was to establish clear kill/pivot/persevere criteria at each testing phase before experimentation.
We soon built up an ‘experimentation backlog’, wherein we tested product concepts with increasing rigor. For example, high-risk ideas were purposely tested with the simplest and least time-consuming methods (e.g., a smoke test with a landing page and simple CTA). As each opportunity gathered stronger evidence of product-market fit, we’d then shift to validating commercial viability (e.g., the service obtainable market). Once out of the testing stages, we’d have solid evidence to support go-to market strategies for new products.
Impact: The new methodologies quickly made an impact. Adapting and implementing established discovery frameworks allowed the team to test multiple product ideas simultaneously while also effectively managing existing products. The evidence gathered allowed us to assess how promising, or not, particular product concepts would be. My team has been able to assess new product ideas much faster than we had imagined before adopting these new methods.
There’s a myth that testing and research is laborious and time consuming, but what’s worse? Investing some time and effort to validate an idea or investing time and effort to launch a product and have it fail in the market because it doesn’t deliver enough value to customers? I’m proud to say that my team has killed many seemingly promising product ideas. Empirical evidence gathered from testing and research made it clear that some ideas would never achieve the required levels of product-market fit.
An experimentation approach to collect empirical evidence for product discovery has created other benefits as well. To start, my kill/pivot/persevere decisions, as they’re evidence based, are transparent and justifiable, which is particularly important when dealing with both senior management and other stakeholders. Business investment cases are also stronger precisely because of the validation behind them. Also, the approach has allowed me and my team to build up strong competencies in product testing methodologies - something I’d consider critical for a successful career in product management. As in other cases, my team’s work has served as a model for other product teams aiming to adopt an experimental approach to product development.
Strategic Partnerships
An important, ongoing theme in my approach to product leadership is open innovation. The advantages of business ecosystems are well-established and strategic partnerships, following from pilot partnerships, offer efficient ways to explore product and business opportunity spaces. In this section, I showcase some particularly noteworthy examples.
CiteAb: The First Publishing Partner for Lab Reagents Data
Context: Based on my team’s successful deploy of an antibody data search, there was a clear opportunity to broaden activity in this space. Specifically, this meant compiling more reagent data and also looking at opportunities to expand our reach. Although the team had developed considerable technical expertise, partnering with a specialist firm to complement our efforts could be hugely beneficial. On a product level, providing more contextualized antibody usage data would bring greater value to researchers by supporting experimental reproducibility. On a commercial level, collaborating with specialists would open the door to new data monetization opportunities (see case study on ‘Data Monetization’).
Approach: As the life science reagents data market is quite niche, there weren’t many potential partners to explore. That said, I did initiate and oversee some pilot partnerships with specialist firms. Unfortunately, none of these projects were successful. The situation took a fortunate turn, however, when my team made contact with the life science data startup CiteAb.
CiteAb’s data products had reached good product-market fit. However, their data coverage could benefit from incorporating the life science data my team could provide. Such an arrangement would be mutually beneficial: CiteAb could fill data coverage gaps while my team would benefit from increased experience and exposure in the larger life science data space.
Aligning on a pilot project, we designed tests to validate foundational hypotheses. Gratifyingly, the pilot was successful and discussions then shifted to agreeing on commercial terms for a full-scale partnership. Terms were quickly agreed, though new workflows and templates to support a data monetization partnership of this sort were being developed simultaneously. In the end, a novel commercial structure was accepted, setting the stage for a full scale partnership.
Impact: The impact and influence of the partnership with CiteAb was multifaceted. To start, the partnership meant that Springer Nature was the first publisher to collaborate with CiteAb, a clear demonstration of open innovation aimed at supporting the research community.
For Springer Nature, the partnership was quite signficant. The terms agreed to with CiteAb were the first of their kind at Springer Nature, for example, a data sharing provision allowed for CiteAb-enriched data to be incorporated into the Springer Nature Experiments platform. This enhancement helped increase traffic, engagement, and platform user satisfaction scores. Business impacts were equally significant. The legal and commercial terms of the CiteAb partnership formed the basis of other future partnerships. Furthermore, the partnership represented a successful effort at establishing a completely new revenue stream in a previously unexplored market.
Protocols.io: Partnering to Supporting Digital Transformation via Open Science
Context: Two slowly evolving yet extremely important developments in modern scientific research are open science and digital transformation. Open science aims to make science more transparent and inclusive by, among other things, making research and related data widely available and accessible. Digital transformation, in a scientific context, is a fundamental shift to fully digital (and often automated) lab infrastructures and operating models.
Gaining a deeper understanding of these two important shifts is a critical concern for my team because both open science and digital transformation are reinventing how science is done. However, these spaces were (are!) highly fragmented. A plethora of policies, products, platforms, standards, and adoption levels make product discovery a challenge. This challenge is especially poignant since my team’s product work on lab protocols is well-positioned to play an important role. We had a clear need to better understand the opportunity spaces and to use this understanding as a foundation for new product and business development.
Approach: The fragmentation of digital lab and open science spaces made pilot partnerships an especially attractive option. Thus, I connected with a potentially ideal partner: the startup protocols.io. They had built a cutting-edge digital platform for lab protocols and had established themselves as a fast-rising player in the open, digital research space. We quickly aligned on the scope for a pilot partnership. For the pilot, a content selection from my team’s products would be converted and made available on the protocols.io platform. The two product teams would then jointly study user behaviors and workflows to better understand open science behaviors and the uptake of digital lab tools. Depending on the outcome, there was a potential for a fast scale up as well.
Impact: Like many a good study, the pilot project produced more questions than answers. What was clear, however, was that the opportunity space, i.e. the intersection of open science and digital labs, was validated as a strategically important one. Another important outcome of the pilot was the firm foundation for collaboration with protocols.io and our mutually shared vision to support open science and digital transformation. This vision and the positive experience during the pilot partnership directly contributed to the most important outcome of the pilot partnership - Springer Nature’s acquisition of protocols.io. Personally, it was thrilling to see protocols.io go from external collaborators to colleagues in the same business unit. I’m very proud that my efforts played a part in this story and I’m especially excited to continue working with the protocols.io team on projects in the open science and lab digitization spaces.
Developing Talent
Attracting and especially developing talent is one of the most critical and challenging tasks for a product leader. I firmly believe that good product managers and product leaders, are made, not born. One of my most profound insights as a product leader is that my team is my product. The selection below showcases some of my favorite talent development initiatives.
Co-Founding the Springer Nature Product Academy
Context: Working at a multinational company, with over 9,000 employees and dozens of offices globally, means it’s sometimes difficult to connect, share experiences, and collaborate. This was especially true for the product management function. The craft of product management was evolving (and continues to evolve!) in parallel to the new types of products that teams like mine work on. As naturally curious people, product managers and leaders began showing increasing interest in empowering better connections between the many diverse product teams. In this context, the appointment of a new C-Suite product leader was the catalyst for action.
Approach and Impact: As one of the most prominent advocates for an internal product management network in my business unit, I joined the newly formed leadership team of what would become the Springer Nature Product Academy. With the support of senior management, the Product Academy is tasked with providing opportunities to the support the practice of product management and company-wide product community. The remit is purposely very broad - my role on the leadership team member is to organize and help steer the development of Product Academy. The activities are varied, e.g., sponsoring product-related training courses, organizing internal networking and case study events, and organizing guest lectures. A big highlight for me was helping to organize and then moderate a session with our inaugural guest speaker - the legendary Marty Cagan himself (see below)! To date, the Product Academy has and continues to support hundreds of product managers and product leaders with the scope to do even more.
Implementing a Dual-Track Career Path
Context: A major challenge in developing product management talent is figuring out what the career ladders should look like. Specifically, is becoming a people manager the only way to advance and develop? I faced this very question when managing an experienced, high-performing senior product manager in my team. Her skills and achievements warranted a promotion, however, the only position available was to ‘group product manager’ with direct line management responsibility. Given my team’s size, this move unfortunately wasn’t an option. The fundamental problem was that there were no advanced, individual contributor (IC) roles available.
Approach and Impact: I learned that other product leaders were similarly dissatisfied with the lack of senior IC roles and the resulting lack of options to promote people into non-people manager tracks. The topic of dual-track career paths is well-established in some areas, like software engineering, but isn’t (yet) widely implemented in product management. There are, however, examples of dual track paths being implemented that could be used as a model (see the above image from Sherif Mansour’s article on dual track paths at Atlassian).
Not taking ‘no’ for an answer, I developed a proposal for a new, senior level IC product manager role and presented this to the HR teams. I positioned the role as not only helping in talent retention and development, but also addressing the more widespread challenge that other product leaders were having. In principal, there was support but time would be needed to implement the proposal. In the end, the proposal was successful and a new, senior level IC role was created - the ‘principal product manager.’ I could thus move ahead with the promotion. This achievement was particularly noteworthy as this was the first ever role of its kind at the company. While many structural changes are ongoing, creating the ‘principal product manager’ role was a critical first step in the quest to implement dual-track career paths more broadly.
Corporate Sponsorship for Toastmasters International Membership
Context: As detailed on my ‘Resources’ page, I was a founding officer of the first ever Toastmasters group at Springer Nature. The group grew and continued to thrive, achieving various levels of Distinguished Club Status since founding. However, there was one milestone I and the rest of the club leadership wanted to reach: having membership fees covered by the company. Not only would full sponsorship of Toastmasters membership fees lower the entry barriers, but the ongoing benefits would be greatly welcomed by existing members too.
Approach and Impact: The shift to hybrid working during the COVID-19 pandemic meant that all co-workers could participate, join, and benefit from Springer Nature Toastmasters. Using this fact, I helped develop a business case for the company to sponsor new membership fees for new and existing members. The modest membership price, when compared to many, much more expensive one-off trainings, was a key selling point. Another important point was fostering a sense of community and connection precisely because of the shift to hybrid working. The proposal for sponsorship was well-received by the global learning and development leadership and I supported the subsequent rollout. As a result, Springer Nature Toastmasters has not only continued to thrive with new members, but a spin-off club specifically catering to India-based colleagues was created as well, giving even more opportunities for colleagues to develop their leadership and communications skills.
