Product surgery

This summer I’ve been dealing with a frustrating and limiting injury. While performing an ordinary yard work task—hoisting a heavy beam while cleaning up a pile of old lumber—I felt a painful pop-pop in my elbow. An MRI revealed a “full-width rupture of the right biceps tendon.” In late July, I had surgery to repair it. Over the past few weeks, I've been navigating a brace, painkillers, and physical therapy to get back in action. I’m getting better every day, and thanks for asking.

I’m not sharing this for sympathy, but instead to express gratitude for what I’ve been learning through the experience. I tend to find little product and business lessons embedded in too many things. The best of these usually feature good people and interesting systems. And this little orthopedic issue has made me even more aware of the wonder of technology and the glory of teammates.

First, the technology. I’ve maintained my productivity throughout this period due to technology that didn’t even exist when I started my product career. Remote conferencing tools have become boringly, impressively effective; collaboration platforms like Slack keep me ambiently aware of people and work even while I’m lying on a couch; and SaaS platforms make it possible for me to access data, designs, content, and systems from anywhere. I’ve also become fairly adept at using speech recognition software, reducing my reliance on typing, though causing some hilarity when voice access tools pick up surrounding conversation and drop it in a document. And that’s not even considering the marvelous medical technology that made the healing possible at all.

But even more than the tools and the tech, this issue with my elbow has made me grateful for great teammates. A bum wing doesn’t mean bum productivity, if you are lucky enough to work with the kind of people I work with. Leaders at Solution Design Group have given me nothing but support; SDG colleagues have helped fill a few gaps even while I’ve been racing back to health; and my consulting customers have been overwhelmingly accommodating and flexible. It all makes a fella grateful.

Speaking of grateful, this month we thank a team at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota for their time and wisdom. They’ve been redesigning their business and technology operating model to focus on discovering and delivering great value-producing products. We were lucky enough to interview them for this issue.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Ruthlessly prioritizing for valuable results: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (BCBSMN) and their product journey

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (BCBSMN) is the largest non-profit health plan in Minnesota. In recent years, the company has shifted from running enterprise projects to organizing around digital and service products, managed by product teams. At SDG, we’ve been impressed with the foresight and persistence behind this change, and we were thrilled when the BCBSMN leaders agreed to share their story with our Pollinator community. It’s an inspiring example of iterative, customer-centered, results-driven product work.

Thanks to these BCBSMN employees for sharing their story:

• Chris Diller, Director of Product Transformation

• Dan Bliss, Principal Product Consultant

• Tiffany Lauria, VP of Execution and Value Delivery

The Pollinator: What prompted BCBSMN to begin a transition to a product operating model? Was there a specific motivator or set of challenges?

BCBSMN: Increased customer demand for affordability, rising operating costs, and intensifying market competition were key drivers. We also recognized the need to overcome internal organizational silos, improve cross-functional collaboration, and become more adaptable to changing environments and emerging technologies.

The Pollinator: Describe the differences between how your teams operated under the old model vs. your new product-driven approach. Are there shifts in mindset, structure, or day-to-day work that stand out?

BCBSMN: Under the old model, accountability wasn’t clear and we couldn’t point to outcomes of our work. We also tended to overcommit, often tapping the same ten people for critical initiatives. With our new approach, accountability for each product is clear. Each team tracks outcomes using KPIs and OKRs. Teams are ruthless about prioritization, which has made delivery more predictable.

The Pollinator: How have roles or organizational structures at BCBSMN changed as part of the shift to a product model?

BCBSMN: We've been really lucky to have a partnership with HR from the start to define new product roles like Product Managers. They've helped us restructure into Product Teams within Product Lines, ensuring that each team has the skills needed to deliver valuable results to their customers. In some areas, we have reduced layers and clarified what value each role and layer drives.

The Pollinator: What’s been the hardest part of the journey? How have you worked through these challenges?

BCBSMN: The hardest part has been overcoming resistance to change. At a company with nearly 100 years of legacy, many employees have been in their roles for decades, with long-standing expectations and habits. But as Marshall Goldsmith said, "what got us here won't get us there." Our partnership with HR has been essential to evolve culture and communication.

The Pollinator: What benefits have you seen from your new way of working? Have you seen any measurable improvements in business results or outcomes?

BCBSMN: We've seen huge gains in teams' abilities to deliver predictably. Each team that starts hyper sprints is encouraged to aim for a predictability range of 80–120%. While small two-day sprint stories can be challenging at first, teams quickly learn to size work effectively. The result is transparent, frequent delivery of incremental value. We also see teams now treating their product as a “business.” This perspective has even led to decommissioning vendors that weren’t delivering the expected value.

The Pollinator: What advice would you give to other organizations thinking about this shift?

BCBSMN: A few practical tips:

• Ground teams in the mindsets first. Practices and culture flow from there.

• Involve leadership early, build commitments, and hold them accountable to behaviors.

• Make space for teams to learn by grappling with problems.

• Empower the community to learn from each other. Transformation happens with others, not to them.

• Most importantly, build a great team and have some fun along the way!

More blossoms

The “No Differentiation” Illusion, by April Dunford

April Dunford is an expert in product and business positioning. Her fundamental approach is to help companies identify what she calls the differentiated value of a product.

In this issue of her newsletter from September 2024, she explores this question: ”How should we position a product that has no differentiation?” Her thesis: more often than not, your product is in fact different in some way from its competitors. You just need to find that differentiation. The most helpful part of her article: the chart listing why you have no differentation, what the problem might actually be, and how you might fix it. It includes examples like “value blindness” or “product pessimism.” Check it out!

Bank of England’s Digital Pound product roadmap, by the Bank of England

The Bank of England is working with HM (His Majesty’s) Treasury on plans for a digital pound, an electronic version of the British Pound currency. The bank maintains a rich website explaining the digital product strategy involved in this complex work. You don’t need to be an expert in finance to appreciate the transparency and depth of the information they’re sharing. This product strategy note, published in July, lays out their roadmap and decision points. It’s a great, public example of transparent product planning.

It’s time to prototype, by Marcus Castenfors

Here's a good article from product thinker Marcus Castenfors about prototyping and discovery and how these practices have changed with the advent of A.I. tools. His essay was inspired by a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) from a current Googler, Madhu Guru. Guru notes that Google is shifting from a writing-first to a building-first product company. You can find Guru’s tweet/xeet in Castenfors’s article.

First, I don't love how cavalierly Guru (not Castenfors, really) dismisses the steps of writing. I just don't think a writing vs. building binary is accurate or helpful, and framing writing as a “proxy” for thinking misses the fundamental point that clear writing is a form of clear thinking.

But at heart, Castenfors (and Guru) is right: prototyping is much easier with A.I., and the evolution of tools reflects this. Indeed prototyping an interface and an experience is one of the more powerful uses of A.I. that's available to product professionals. SDG has been guiding our customers through similar work lately, and it’s pretty impressive.

Finally, I appreciate how Castenfors emphasizes the craft of product in these A.I.-dominated times. I only wish he still included “writing” in his “through thinking…and sketching” in the otherwise excellent quote below.

Outside the Box

Our World In Data is a website that is absolutely stuffed with charts and graphs that explain this crazy world of ours. It’s funded by a British non-profit called Global Change Data Lab. Our World in Data includes over 14,000 charts, nicely designed and catalogued, on a variety of topics related to human life on earth. Want to know the leading cause of death in the world’s richest nations? What percentage of each continent is dedicated to agriculture? Which country has the highest percentage of its population born in another country? (The last one’s a bit of a trick question: it’s The Vatican, at 100%). Bookmark this site and use it to satisfy your curiosity.

Check it out at https://ourworldindata.org/

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.