I inherited a department full of operational teams full of extraordinary talent, with the opportunity to accomplish so much more. At the same time, these highly technical teams struggled to communicate the value they provided to both stakeholders and their customers.
Operational mindset
Having an operational mindset fixated teams thinking "we maintain X technology". In most cases, technology here was thankfully generic, like "monitoring", "deployment", "real time communication". However, in some cases, identities were tied to a specific vendor's implementation of a technology.
This mindset made keeping the status quo phenomenally successful. However, it meant that the customers/users of the technology could be neglected and siloed thinking to only within the existing walls.
Product mindset
However, if we treat each team as a product team (where the technology used is the product and the customers are the ones leveraging it), we completely flip the script. Goodbye status quo. Hello customer satisfaction and value creation.
What did this switch really mean?
It started with identifying who the customers are, identifying their user journeys, and creating KPIs to measure how well the teams' technology/patterns provided value. We even started doing user research, ensuring we had an ear to what the data wasn't telling us.
It was incredibly successful. Our customer satisfaction was through the roof as we focused on the areas that created the biggest customer impact.