We often make the mistake of delivering a ‘project’ when we should be creating and managing a ‘product’.

The Product-thinking lens can open us up to more appropriate approaches to resolving the challenges we have, and we’ll continue to face, as time progresses and customer needs evolve.

It helps us recognising that our challenges with technology and data, are opportunities for product improvement. We deliver features with a unified team of designers, engineers, salespeople, marketers etc.

It helps us recognising that user adoption is not a problem you can just relegate to a change management team and expect them to resolve it without struggle. Rather, user adoption can be tackled as it would when introducing a new or improved product to a market. We’re trying to enter that market and present a new way of doing things and with that comes all the opportunity and challenges inherent in introducing a new product into an existing market.

Aside from how we engage with our users, Product-thinking means considering how we manage the team responsible for bringing the product to fruition. I am a strong believer that incentives drive behaviour.

Project teams are measured and incentivised by completion of a set of tasks and creation of deliverables. For long we’ve been bold to assume that completion of a specific set of tasks will result in the actual outcome we want. It may be true for hyper-specific technical projects, but it is simply not the case when customers or users are involved.

Product teams are more directly measured and incentivised by outcomes that matter. Customer growth, word of mouth and sentiment or a proxy of that such as NPS. Teams are then driven to make decisions that are more directly linked to the target outcomes because they are measured (and ultimately incentivised) based on those outcomes.

We’re lagging behind in Australia although certain industry leaders such as CBA in financial services and Medibank in health insurance are well ahead of the pack.

Startups and modern technology companies have a natural inclination for this way of thinking. Big-4 Consulting is still hanging on to projects even when it doesn’t make sense to do so. Until we start actively asking the question “is this a project or a product?” we will keep falling into the same old traps.

Time for a mindset change among consultants and time to challenge ourselves to ensure we’re finding the right way (not only the historic way) of helping our clients succeed.