Develop expertise in business strategy & digital transformation

Remember our career development diagram? It helps us to understand that when we move from product management to product leadership, we need to start focussing on our generall leadership skills. Working on public services within digital and technology teams within UK government, ‘leadership skills’ can often mean two things in particular:

Business Strategy - The ability to apply business strategy and management frameworks to employ agile as a competitive business advantage such as Lean Start-Up and Lean Enterprise, product innovation techniques, flow-based business process management approaches, and other techniques that relate to innovating in the business domain.

Digital Transformation - The ability to facilitate, accelerate and (as appropriate) lead organisational change and transformation. This area draws on change management, organisation culture, organisation development, systems thinking, and other behavioral sciences.

There are many resources out there to help with developing our expertise when it comes to business strategy and digital transformation but three of particular value are:

Lean Enterprise by Jezz Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly provides essential guidance across business strategy, digital transformation, and (to some extent) product management expertise. They take the concepts of The Lean Startup and explain how they work in an enterprise setting.

The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz focusesses on business strategy. The book is intended to help define the role of Chief Information Officer in a modern, value-driven organisation where technology is becoming less important than the outcomes it helps deliver, but in doing so provides lots of tools to help us work out what ‘value’ actually means in the context of government.

An Introduction to Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley provides an introduction to the eponymous value chain mapping tool that Simon developed to help organisations build their business strategy. This video featuring Simon also provides a useful introduction. Simon provides the story of developing Wardley Mapping in this post.

Additional reading: Why product people should care about business strategy, Roman Pichler