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Reimagining Support Functions

An excerpt from the forthcoming book “Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products” by David Fradin with RN Prasad.


With the coming “Perfect Storm,” the staffing or support functions in the organization like Human Resources, Finance, Legal, Marketing Communications, Operations, Business Process improvements, and IT are being reimagined.  With technology-driven automation and digitization, these functions can become more productive, expand their scope, and contribute to the success of the organization.  In this section, I will discuss how each area can be reimagined.

Innovation

Innovation, once the purview of only the research and development organization has now, with the digital age, can be done in all support functions and line functions in addition to manufacturing, marketing, and sales. 

Human-Centered Design

For the reimagined support functions, one should use human-centered design as a primary consideration.  Human-centered design or as some call it design thinking will make it easier for your employees to get work done.  Plus make it easier to improve customer satisfaction.

Business Process Improvements

A business process can be improved using artificial intelligence (AI).  The AI can sense, comprehend, act, and learn in real-time.  Accenture says create self-adapting, self-optimizing “living processes” that use machine learning algorithms and real-time data to improve continuously.  A full implementation, according to the Accenture survey, has resulted in a 200% improvement in enterprise KPIs by reimagining processes from scratch, enabling better human-machine interaction, and accessing dark data.

Likewise, HR and product management should team up to review the existing product management lifecycle by reviewing each outcome from each task in the lifecycle in terms of value created and whether or not it can be executed better, faster, cheaper, or with fewer people.  Plus you should look at what would provide a competitive advantage and then select with IT’s help the robots, the data analytics, the AI, the machine learning, and the people to implement.

All of this is leading to what is now being called Integrated Business Services or IBS.  IBS delivers value-add services end-to-end, addressing enterprise-wide business problems consistent, high quality, and cost-competitive manners. IBS takes into account new digital capabilities such as cloud computing, robotic process automation, analytics, machine learning,  and blockchain. Integrating business services provides new efficiencies and increased productivity.

Marketing

Marketing and IT are now collaborating to manage the customer experience instead of just customer acquisition.  This is enabling marketers to treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behaviors. So this is done by data analytics and cognitive computing to understand the context of customer desires and needs and decide the best way to interact with them.  Content gets tailored and delivered both digitally and physically.  For example, a customer expresses an interest in a product online and then when they wander into a store, a smartphone app directs them to the product and perhaps notifies a salesperson nearby as to the interest.

Instead of relying on outsourcing to marketing service providers and advertising agencies, the collaboration between marketing and IT is bringing this function in-house.

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Since the product marketing manager is closest to the customer and has detailed knowledge about the product, the organizational structure needs to support the people in that role.

The rapid changes in this area and the others discussed in this section will require that IT be more agile and develop faster than ever before; otherwise, the organization may find itself at a competitive disadvantage. If IT is not quick and agile enough, the product marketing managers should be empowered to go outside the organization to get the job done.  It is simply critical to product and company success.

This means the product marketing manager must keep up with developing cloud-based applications and technologies. Organizationally they need the authority to direct marketing and IT for the best customer experience solutions.

Finance

In the past, finance has tended to be in charge and referred to as the finance/legal/distribution sales prevention department.  However, today, with the customer as king, finance must seamlessly support the marketing and selling process.  Not get in the way. As with other departments, AI will be deployed.

Finance will need to undergo a mindset change to understand that what they do must help the customer gain value and support a quality customer experience.

To that end, finance has data that can help product success management make better decisions and quicker.  Finance should be organized such that product managers have the authority to request and get the reports or data on their product dashboard when they want them.

Because many product managers are not familiar with many finance competencies like calculating return on investment, finance could be quiet helpful to product managers by helping them calculate their product ROI to the company and for its customers. Accordingly, product managers should be given the authority to request such assistance.

IT

To give the organization a competitive advantage, the IT department needs to integrate technology, processes, and people at the speed required by product management, marketing, sales, and other organizations.

Data Analytics

People in the field of data analytics believe that analytics will transform how organizations are managed as well as the markets in which they operate. More and more data is becoming available from inside and outside the organization to help understand the customer plus new analytic tools and services are becoming available to comprehend all that data at a deeper level of detail.

Data and analytics is a core asset for strategy, marketing, operations, and customer service. Speed in gathering and analyzing is critical. However, senior managers need to support data-driven decisions.  This has been the key to Google’s exceptional success since its decision making is almost entirely data-driven.

Analytics have driven the improvements we have seen in product usefulness and user experience with the product such as at Linkedin and Paypal over the past 10-15 years. Both product’s user interfaces have significantly improved.

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In addition to seeing what has happened, predictive analytics is predicting what is going to happen in the future.  The data and the predictions must be available to product management when they need it not later as is too often the case. 

Support

As discussed elsewhere in this book, customers have to figure out the support silos the company provides, raise multiple issue tickets and get little or no help.

Customer support is usually measured by resolving individual tickets and not their ability to take a holistic view and fix the problem at their source.  Frequently, I tell the support person for a product I am having trouble with what the systemic problem is (since I can see clearly what is going on as a Product Manager).  However, most don’t seem to care or tell me to call some other number.

So, in addition to changing and reimagining the metrics for success, support departments need to use analytics (including monitoring social media), predictive analysis to see what is going on in the support stream and incentivize solutions emanating from the support team.

Human Resources

Although I discuss HR in greater depth elsewhere in this book, under the title of HR reimagined, a few additional comments seem to be in order.

Workforce development is increasingly important since the lack of career growth is a driver of people leaving their company.  Product success managers should learn more about artificial intelligence and ways that it can help them with their product throughout the entire product lifecycle. As organizations continue to expand globally, cross-culture training and leadership is becoming more and more critical. The agility to deal with the disruptions and opportunities will increase.

HR’s role will increasingly be more focused on building and maintaining the capacity of the organization in addition to assisting in the formation and maintenance of company culture.

Operations

When operations get aligned closely with business strategy and across functional lines, the company builds an insanely great customer experience, and their competitors find it hard to copy and to compete.  It gives the company what we call here in Silicon Valley an “unfair competitive advantage”.

To reimagine operations, it is vital to know what customers value and keep track of changes.  Processes must continuously be upgraded and improved. Operations must align with the business strategy and not get in the way and be resilient.  Lastly, operations should build on existing strengths.

Summary

Innovation is no longer just the purview of the research and development department.  It can happen anywhere in the organization including support.  Innovation should be based on human-centered design or design thinking.  Business processes should be integrated and may benefit from artificial intelligence.  Marketing should be focusing on the customer experience not just lead generation.  Finance needs to focus on customer satisfaction. IT needs to integrate itself throughout the organization and be able to quickly respond to its needs. Data analytics will become increasingly important.  Support needs to be integrated for full customer satisfaction. HR needs to focus on strategic talent development with an eye on what the organization will need in the future.  Operations will need to also focus on customer satisfaction.

Further Reading

https://leadsmarttech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/leadsmart-product-overview-nov-2018.pdf

https://www.gensler.com/uploads/document/406/file/Reimagining-Learning-US.pdf

https://www.tcs.com/content/dam/tcs/pdf/Services/CES/Reimagining-Shared-Services-as-an-Integrated-Business-Services-Function.pdf

https://www.accenture.com/t00010101t000000__w__/gb-en/_acnmedia/accenture/conversion-assets/microsites/documents21/accenture-transcript-tech-vision-trend-5.pdf

https://www.myadrenalin.com/site_media/DATA/brochures/Adrenalin_Product_Brochure.pdf

https://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/consulting/people-and-organisation/reimagining-leadership/steering-indias-workforce-in-2030.pdf

http://app.ihi.org/FacultyDocuments/Events/Event-3135/Presentation-17375/Document-14498/Presentation_SL17_Reimagining_Leadership_Development_CDouma.pdf

https://www.pwc.ch/en/publications/2017/Reimagine-and-transform-your-finance-function.pdf

https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-process-reimagined

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ie/Documents/Technology/ie-technology-DUP-TechTrends2016.pdf

http://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/Reimagining%20retail_2018.PDF

https://www.tdstreamone.com/ruf/RU1_Fbb75f8ad0e320d07b39c0124e897f126_An-executives-guide-to-reimagining-the-enterprise-in-the-digital-age-August-2014-Screen.pdf

https://www.genpact.com/downloadable-content/enterprise-performance-analytics-reimagining-performance-reporting-with-digital.pdf

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/uk/Documents/technology/deloitte-uk-tech-trends-2019-chapter6-beyond-marketing.pdf

https://apac.aonhewitt.com/home/resources/thought-leadership/reimagining-hr-for-2025

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/operations/reimagining-operations.pdf

https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/accenture/conversion-assets/dotcom/documents/global/pdf/about-accenture/accenture-reimagined-operations.pdf

https://www.infosys.com/digital/insights/Documents/reimagining-digital-experience-platforms.pdf

https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/whitepaper2/reimagining-possible-data-analytics-106272.pdf

https://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/32/en/32014632usen/the-modern-marketing-mandate_chief-marketing-officer-study_32014632USEN.pdf

https://www.roffeypark.com/wp-content/uploads2/Reimagining-HR-External-reduced-2mb_final.pdf

https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/fpia_pov_final.pdf

https://www.genpact.com/downloadable-content/insight/reimagining-end-user-experience-through-intelligent-and-customized-support-processes.pdfhttps://www.roffeypark.com/wp-content/uploads2/Reimagining-HR-Paper-External.pdf

David Fradin


David Fradin has trained thousands of managers throughout the world in the successful management of products. With over 47 years of experience across major companies, 75+ products and services and 11 startups, he infuses his workshops with insights gained as an expert product leader, product manager and product marketing manager at companies like Apple and HP. He was classically trained as an HP Product Manager and was then recruited by Apple to bring the first hard disk drive on a PC to market. As a result of his leadership and management skills, Apple promoted him first to Apple /// Group Product Manager and later Business Unit Manager at the same organizational level at that time as Steve Jobs. He recently authored “Building Insanely Great Products: Some Products Fail, Many Succeed…This is their Story” Lessons from 47 years of experience including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, 75 products, and 11 startups later. Go to: Amazon Store Coming soon will be "Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products" and "Marketing Insanely Great Products." His workshops cover the founding values, vision, product lifecycle and management employed by Apple at its start and which it subscribes to today. You can learn more about his workshops at Spice Catalyst Workshops Soon to be released by Wiley and Sons, in the Early of 2017, is a seven-volume set of university-level textbooks entitled: "Foundations in the Management of Successful Products" covering keys to product success, product market strategy, marketing, soft skills, user experience, user interface, product engineering, and product support. What students will learn in the workshops, online courses and books are cover what has made Apple the most valuable company in the world today. Go to David Fradin @ Youcanbook to schedule a time to talk.

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