A review by allagainforart
Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten

challenging slow-paced

1.0

Main takeaways: 

- Business leaders need to have meaningful insight into the work being completed by IT/engineering and vice versa. 

- Business leaders should be able to answer the following questions - Who is the customer? What value is the customer pulling? What are the value streams? Where is the bottleneck?

- Disparate and unconnected system (ex. no integration between customer service ticketing system and engineering system) can make these questions difficult to answer

- This kind of insight from business leaders is easier to accomplish when business leaders at the top of an organization come from an IT/engineering background (ex. Bill Gates with Microsoft).  

- Organizations are using outdated management models from past technological revolutions to drive digital transformation in the age of software, and they're wasting money in the process. 

- Enterprise IT organizations have a lot of work to do to catch up with the agility of startups and huge tech giants. 

- The differences in Product vs. Project mindset (table illustrating the differences on pg. 54) and why product mindset is beneficial (pgs. 57-61). 

- It's common for the business to be thinking of work in terms of projects while IT/engineering approaches work in a product oriented way, which means there has to be "constant mapping and remapping." I read this as having to redo roadmaps as plans change. 

- Definition of technical debt and importance of paying down technical debt. 

Book assumes you are already familiar with: 

- Agile and Lean 

- Fordism and Taylorism

Heavily pulls from: 

- Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez

Criticisms: 

- Overly dense and could have been edited down a lot

- Why not focus on a software company as the main case study instead of BMW (as others have pointed out, only to say later in the book that it's not the best comparison?) 

- The takeaways seem too obvious for someone with a lot of experience in software product management, but they are not explained well enough for someone brand new to the discipline. Maybe it's for business leaders who have read a lot about product management but are not that familiar with it in practice, or for enterprise IT professionals trying to reframe their way of thinking. 

Pros: 

- Provides a lot of historical context (Xerox, Nokia, Microsoft, etc.)