Why a Breakfast Club?
We wanted to build a community where like-minded professionals interested in Business Transformation, Operational Excellence, and Change Leadership could come together and share their experiences of transformation. The purpose of the event would be to share insights, discuss real-world challenges, foster strategic thinking, and unlock networking in a relaxed but focused environment.
We chose to organise this opportunity around breakfast, as it gave our club a chance to engage with an inspiring topic that they could take through into the workday. This led to the creation of Lean Tree’s Breakfast Club Series.
Our June Event
Our first Breakfast Club event took place in June, with an amazing guest speaker in the form of VP of Digital Product and User Experience, Ana Monzon who joined me on stage. We talked through Ana’s experience transforming an organisation to create value through a product-led approach; delving into the challenges that kick-started the change and exploring the key learnings from the journey.
Ana shared that some of the world’s most successful digital organisations employ the product-led model as it creates clarity, purpose and direction. Unifying cross-functional teams towards shared goals and pushing business further than was considered achievable.
The transformation that Ana and her team undertook involved moving the organisation away from a “feature factory” focused on output, to one truly centred on delivering value to the customer. Alongside championing a digital transformation that positioned the brand to remain innovative and competitive within a rapidly evolving market.
Key Takeaways from This Event
Having an extremely clear vision, providing both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ is vital. Anchor everything in business and customer value and be clear on what success looks like and how you will track it. All teams should be able to say: “This is what I am doing and here is how it helps you”.
Empower your cross functional team to make decisions and trust in their judgement is critical. Creating an environment for teams to be truly accountable is extremely powerful.
Deliver small and early; experimentation, proof of concepts and A/B tests are key to validate concepts early, reduce risk and build confidence and momentum in the new way of working based on data and insight.
Don’t underestimate the emotional side of change. Bring people on the journey with you, right from the start, and communicate at all levels and at all points to keep them connected.
Subject matter expertise within teams must be nurtured.
The people side of transformation
When we opened the floor to questions, most followed a similar theme, asking Ana’s advice for specific actions the leaders in the room could take to promote a product-led delivery approach for the individuals involved, both within existing teams, and with the creation of new ones.
For existing teams, Ana’s tips on assisting to change the mindsets to a product-led approach were focused on advocacy. Communication and storytelling were strong themes within her discussion, and she reiterated again that empowering your teams and allowing them to make judgement calls, based on data and insights was imperative. Engaging the support of the right sort of sponsor within the business, typically your CFO, CEO or CCO is also key to support the change. Someone who can signal the strategic importance across the rest of the organisation, enforce accountability and re-iterate the wider positive impacts in achieving the shared vision and outcomes.
With the lens of building new teams and hiring the right skillsets, Ana explained she places her emphasis on mindset and culture, autonomy and ownership as well having individuals who are extremely data literate and focused. This can be sometimes difficult to balance within an SME and take time to build out teams with the right experience and skill. To support on this journey, finding the right partner to work alongside you is essential, they need the right mindset and experience operating in this way and be willing to roll up their sleeves, working alongside and supporting existing teams instead of supplanting them. Her key piece of advice was that when working with a partner, existing teams shouldn’t feel threatened.
Overall, the topic allowed us a great opportunity to peer behind the curtain of a product-led transformation and the inner-workings of the operation. This meant that everyone in the room had the opportunity to hear directly from an individual who has undertaken a vast transformation journey and take insights and learnings directly from Ana’s experience.
How Do I Sign Up to Hear More About the Breakfast Club?
Didn’t make it to June’s Breakfast Club event? We’re well underway with planning our next event in September. Once we’ve got details to share, we’ll make them available on our LinkedIn page. https://www.linkedin.com/company/lean-tree
