Service Business Product Owners

Creating a product, whether digital or a physical good, is all about designing the “thing” to deliver the maximum delight to the consumer of it. No more than required as the law of diminishing returns will kick in and the cost and complexity of the product will start to drive your customers away for every “might want feature” that you tack on. You as Product Owner have to find that sweet spot and science the crap out of it to maximize your ROI and focus your solution for as much market penetration as possible along the vertical that you have chosen.

Creating a product that is a service that you deliver is exactly the same thing, but, you are not building a product, instead you are building a process to deliver the maximum delight to the consumer of the service. You are a process engineer. Continuously tweaking how your customer buys, you deliver, and they take delivery, of the service you offer. You don’t want to add more to your service than you need as you will “over” serve and annoy your consumer and drive their costs up. Instead, you want to deliver what appears to be the maximum service ever received for the least possible effort on your part. You science the crap out of this as well, but this time “process engineer” it. Constantly innovate how and what you deliver and measure the results of every change you make. Process Engineer (Build), Measure, Learn and repeat for the service industry. Every person on your team has to instinctively know the process, without hesitation, and they have to be constantly creating and embracing change in the process to continually one up the delivery of your product. If your team isn’t in synch, in full flow as a team, your service will suffer and your customers will in turn suffer.