The Impact of Pilot Teams In Product Transformations

Pilot teams are an effective tool that should be used by all organizations trying to adopt the product operating model. I'll discuss how we deploy them and measure the impact of the product model.

I believe we have way too much Science Fiction content when we discuss product management, design, engineering, or agile.

It allows content creators to be very creative with cool diagrams, infographics, and stories about potential and theoretical use cases. However, this makes our craft always more confusing for our audience and creates false and damaging expectations about the reality of the work.

That's why I want to share more real-world data and insights. I'm currently engaged in 3 product transformations with large-scale, multinational organizations—the kind of complex structures you may work in and for which none of the magical recipes from LinkedIn and consulting firms proved effective.

Adopting Marty Cagan / Silicon Valley Product Group's product operating model is hard. But not impossible. It's not theoretical or idealistic, and only people with no experience with the model can claim such things.

To kickstart some changes, pilot teams are an incredibly powerful tool to create momentum. Creating "islands of empowerment" is absolutely possible, and I've been doing it for years now. Here is how we do it:

👉 We create exceptions with a couple of pilot teams. We overinvest in coaching for these teams so they can quickly adopt most of the principles behind the product operating model.

👉 We overcommunicate success and achievements from these pilot teams to generate interest from the other teams (Pull effect) and allow the model to spread.

👉 We push the product model to an entire product / product line / business unit to ensure it no longer competes with old habits. Even when you want to change, old habits are incredibly sticky. Just think about going to the gym!

Here is some real-world data of deploying pilot teams.

The numbers represent the perception from team members of how well the behaviors and practices of the product operating model are applied. The key insight here is the confirmation by all the product team members, including product managers, designers and developers that they feel much more product-centric.

Especially, you can see big jump with Strategy and OKRs - This is where there are often a lot of quick wins. Just giving clear success criteria to a product team, a problem to solve instead of a solution to implement, can completely change the dynamic of the team.

But be careful - Surveying the teams is great to gather insights, and ensuring the teams really feel the difference is crucial. But it can’t be trusted. Which is why we also still perform a team assessment and are training product leaders to make them so they can be really autonomous in coaching the product model.

The pilot teams now project to have a combined impact of tens of millions of dollars just in 2025. And if you like these “Coaching In Public” posts, I’ll be happy to dig more into the numbers for you, let me know!