Aligning Product And Technology functions for performance, and the role of leadership and the emergence of a CPTO

From Silos to Synergy: Unlocking Organizational Excellence Through Product-Tech Alignment

I had the pleasure of Chairing a very interesting panel debate this week, arranged and hosted by modu.digital. The gist of which is summarised in this post, overlaid with some of my personal perspectives and thoughts, with just some of my key takeaways. The talented and very experienced panel consisted of the following experts:

1. Conrad Ford - Chief Product & Strategy Officer Allica Bank
2. Elisabeth Ling – Experienced CPO, NED & Strategic Product Advisor
3. Seb Chakraborty – Chief Product Technology Officer Domestic & General
4. Julian Browne – Chief Technology Officer modu.digital

Setting The Foundation For Panelist Perspectives

The premise of the event was to explore and share different perspectives and learnings around the challenge of building high performing companies,, where there is a need to improve alignment between Technology and Product teams. While various models have been attempted to improve this relationship, questions remain about whether the root causes are organizational, cultural, region-specific, processes or other.

The key challenge for companies is finding ways to harness Product Management and Technology teams functions effectively to achieve both speed and ROI while maintaining harmony and integration between these crucial disciplines. Roles are emerging such as Chief Technology and Product Officer as a symptom of this.

The Market Shift To Embrace Product

Before diving into the first question, I set the scene by sharing some interesting research conducted by Planview and independently AWS around the shift from Project to Product, Product Operating Models and Organisational Innovation capabilities.

This trend surfaced by Planview's extensive research across 8,000 value streams and 600 global leaders, reveals that product-oriented organizations achieve 60% greater shareholder returns and 16% higher operating margins than their counterparts. Despite these benefits, 97% of organizations face implementation challenges, though projections suggest that 80% of work will be product-oriented within five years by 50% of all respondents.

Research I have personally lead at AWS reveal that high-performing organizations succeed better through customer-centric cultures, harmonized Product and Technology capabilities, defined ownership and value-streams, and where clear and aligned unified goals are present. Key challenges noted include lack of shared operating model, which make it easier to understand ownership and interoperability, and poor value stream visibility; while successful organizations demonstrate strong team integration, connected data strategies, and aligned governance and culture, all while maintaining strong customer relationships their operations.

1. Culture And Processes

Kicking off the first question for the panel, aimed to surface perspectives and understand experiences regarding whether they believed there was tension or challenges in aligning these functions. An interesting consensus followed which raised concerns with the pattern of the Product Management industry going the way of the Agile community and becoming too Process focused. This emphasised as being a bigger problem in Europe than the USA. The learnings shared highlighted the need for Product Leaders/Managers to be more pragmatic and value focused, over being too process driven.

European business culture tend to favour process adherence over outcomes and shows less tolerance for experimentation and failure compared to the USA. However, the success of US-headquartered companies in building effective product teams across Europe demonstrates that leadership culture and mindset, rather than local talent limitations, are the key determinants of Product Management success.

2. The Importance and Influence of Definitions

Exploring factors and symptoms which build walls not bridges between Product and Technology, a shared perspective emerged around the interpretation and importance of recognising the impact of naming and labeling things. For instance, the common phrase “The Product Manager is a Mini-CEO or CEO of the product”, the single threaded leader who ultimately has to make hard calls and trade-offs. This causes many to challenge, assume or confuse people around the organisation, and questions and tensions that arise are rarely explored and addressed for an improved understanding.

Another example was the notion of saying your company is “Product-Led” and what signal that sends to people outside the product function. Although in reality this means everyone across all functions contribute to building and supporting products and focusing on customers and customer-experience, from development through to finance, the naming of this associated to a function can be interpreted as a power of elevated weighting and recognition of the Product team, which can disenfranchise others. All departments and functions need to work together to build and support products and customers, and support a successful business.

In reflection to this theme, we also explored the importance of recognising that nomenclature and taxonomic definitions have an influence for cohesion and alignment, which is under appreciated and often poorly recognized. This is a topic that I see very commonly across businesses struggling with organisational alignment, which I previously shared in another post here - Transparency Through Taxonomies. Many companies have similar objective naming conventions, and it’s important to unlearn and re-learn these as you go to each company, to better understand, align, integrate and operate. Consider for instance, the definitions and different answers one gets when you ask what is a Product, Service or Platform, consider the differences in responsibilities exist across different companies for a Product Manager. Responsibilities are more telling than role titles.

3. Superficial Adoption and Quick Wins

The panel highlighted a pervasive issue in companies attempting to adopt product management: superficial implementation. There's a common misconception that simply hiring or re-titling people as Product Managers automatically creates, or gives the illusion of a Product-Oriented organization. This is was agreed to not unlike other trends such as seen in Agile which companies focusing changes just on the development teams, leading to the illusion that having Scrum teams made them an Agile organisation (Doing Agile, as opposed to Being Agile).

It was unanimous from that panel and audience feedback that companies seek the benefits of Product Management without committing to necessary cultural and operational changes across the wider organisation, leading to Project Managers being hastily re-branded as Product Managers without meaningful changes to their responsibilities or to the dependent functions across the connected value streams. This shallow adoption, can actually be more harmful than beneficial as it undermines genuine Product Management principles and creates confusion across the organisation.

Successfully developing product management capabilities requires a comprehensive approach spanning culture, mechanisms, processes, and organizational design - avoiding shortcuts and simply re-badging existing roles will not work.

4. Don’t Outsource Core Competency’s And Partner With Your Cultural Fit

The audience raised an intriguing question about outsourcing Technology while keeping Product in-house. The panel unanimously emphasized that in today's world, where "software is eating the world", Technology has become a core competency for business success. Their strong recommendation was to avoid outsourcing these core capabilities, though commoditised IT services might be considered for external support. Technology is no longer an IT-Department, it’s a core business and capability not just what you develop for customers, but how you communicate, operate, learn and share information.

This discussion naturally led to addressing the role of third-party partners and consultants. The panel advised that while partners can effectively accelerate capabilities, add capability value, and bring in talent, they should be fully integrated into the company's culture and strategy. Whether working with global teams, distributed teams, or external partners, the key to success lies in deliberate cultural integration, which enhances performance, promotes collaboration, and prevents workforce alienation.

5. Managing Complexity, Aligning Tech And Product Strategy

Wrapping up the evening the discussion surfaced the notion of Organisational, System and Architectural design, with an emphasis on the role of an Architect. In response to this the panel expressed appreciation to Gall’s Law :

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.””

Companies like Amazon have signals and heuristics to have small independent teams, fight and escalate where dependency occurs, and can scale with this in mind. Complexity isn’t designed, it emerges and all systems should seek to be simple and start simple.

Wrap Up

This topic and conversations could have easily gone on for another hour, with so much rich and knowledge and learnings curated from a very experienced panel. I was pleased and privileged being asked to chair this even curated and organised by Heidi Holmes-Anderson by modu.digital, and provisioning this topic to be explored.