Product and Project Mindsets need structural props to deliver transformation together!

 Transformation deliverables were on time but not much used thereafter, is as familiar as this transformation program seems to be in continuous experimentation node with shifting go-love dates!  In most likelihood the transformation lead for the first case is successful Project Manager turned transformation manager, and in latter case its a passionate Product Manager wearing that crown.

Unfolding this quadrium would require bit digging into the mindset of Project Manager and Product Manager. Let us see what a good day looks like for the two species!

A good day in life of a Project Manager, would include weekly review of milestone schedule and risk list without red flags, contractors’ quality assessment coming green and material procurements staying within budget.

A good day in life of a product manager, would include chance meeting with potential customer, who proposed some enhancements that are doable, although with some additional effort and cost, but promises to raise the attractiveness of the proposed solution. 

Let us look at other variances in perspective 

Dimension Product Mindset Project Mindst

	Dimension	Product Mindset	Project Mindset
1	Definition of done	Good enough to learn from and usable by few	Fully specified, tested and signed off
2	Time orientation	Continuous — there is always a next version	Terminal — closure and handover as the final objective
3	Relationship with Failure	Failure is data — a valuable Experiment	Failure is cost — a loss that should have been prevented
4	Relationship with the consumer	Consumers are co-designers with continuous feedback loop throughout	Consumers are surveyed at the start and best left alone during delivery; closed system
5	Relationship with Competitors	Watched continuously; the fight isabout ideas and their appeal	Largely irrelevant except as rivals for scarce resources — land, talent, capital
6	Culture and governance language	Organic; iteration celebrated; ambiguity tolerated; leadership language is exploratory	Mechanistic; milestones celebrated; ambiguity managed; leadership language is directive

 

The unifying thread across all six dimensions is the open and divergent view vs closed and convergent system view of the goal at hand. And both the mindsets have delivered excellent outcomes, when the task required playing on their strengths.

 

Transformation leadership requires meshing-up with both mindsets

Smart Management have conventionally leveraged the power of both the mindsets by segregating and sequencing their ownership through structural boundaries, in terms of ideation and incubation team and projects department, with accountabilities, being overseen at the highest level of Management.   

This approach doesn’t work when aim is to undertake transformation journey with clearly scheduledvalue realizing milestones, that are must for continuing of the program.

Market opportunities come with small time window and require shorter turnaround cycles from conception of an idea to its full roll-out on predefined launch date leaving little time for traditional hand-offs. 

The POD approach requires team to hold full accountability from problem identification to outcome delivery, requiring both the exploratory and execution capabilities in equal measure.

Not many organizations are fortunate in the beginning of the transformation program to have internal leader, who is able to balance both the mindsets and has sufficient sagacity and agency to be able to use relevant mindset as required during the transformation journey.  Importing experienced transformation leader from outside has its own limitations and may not be viable option in all cases. 

So for the Architect of the Transformation program what seems to be emerging viable option is Two in a box model. Let the deputy leader compliment the Program lead with strength in alternate mindset, to ensure that both the transformation journey is ensured and the destination stays relevant in the fast-changing world, characterized by continuously changing expectations, technological evolution and competitive activism.   

Ironically assuming putting two in a box shall work automatically like two pilots flying an aircraft is often the mistake.  Soon it looks like two accomplished chefs being asked to share a kitchen during rush hours.   Unless kitchen is designed to accommodate both, friction is inevitable.  

Three structural props to make two-in-a-box deliver

Here comes the importance of three structural props that would help kitchen deliver desirable dishes on time to its customers. .

1. Shared definition of success with clear skin in the game:  Both needs to define success as happy customers that keep coming back on time and help achieve desired profit and revenue growth. While this would require continuous eye on the menu served, it also means that serving is delivered efficiently, so as to be able to serve the greatest number of customers using resources and assets efficiently.   Great customer experiences and operational discipline must coexist for them to be paid out of profit and sustain enterprise in the long run. 

 

2. Strong governance around scope change and impact visibility:  Not every idea needs to be experimented and nor wait till idea becomes mainstream to be incorporated. Having pre-agreed structure to evaluate any idea for its appeal and trade-off in terms of time, cost including sunk cost, risks, existing partner and procurement commitments brings in the transparency and heart burns during the debated advocacy for or against the change.  It helps to have standard reference mechanism to do reality check and break deadlocks.  It also helps to have some agreed band of minimum and maximum changes and track actuals to be within that band.

 

3. Templatized Program Health Dashboard that reveals truth without assigning blame:   The idea is to deliver status reality within the realm of desired psychological safety and reputational security. Rightly desired dashboard makes the areas of concern and implications of option evident and help deliver bad-news-early.   Designing the right dashboard would include mix of regular indicators around schedule, budget but also process and outcome indicators like Scope volatility, decision turnaround time, technical debt accumulation, early adoption results, team attrition and overall sentiments, and vender responsiveness 

Presence of these three props provides the conducive environment for the kitchen to stay functional and keep performing.

The Real Responsibility of the Transformation Sponsor

For architects of transformation programmes, designing these three structural props correctly initially is a must but greater rigour is in monitoring adherence to them through the journey.  The greatest risk often emerges once the two leaders become comfortable working together. As trust grows, formal guardrails are frequently bypassed in favour of informal arrangements.  That is precisely when risk begins to accumulate.

These structural props are most required in times of conflict, and when things are getting out of contrail and accountability discussions tend to become figure pointing bouts. Once diluted, their ability to resolve tension and maintain balance becomes severely weakened.

That is why the programme sponsor's most important responsibility is to preserve the integrity of these three structural props, while allowing two leaders with fundamentally different mindsets to continue delivering the right outcomes at the right pace.

In the end, successful transformation is not about choosing between the Product mindset and the Project mindset. It is about creating a system in which both can thrive together. The art lies not in selecting the better chef, but in designing the kitchen in a way that it keeps serving desirable dishes, profitably.

When Transformation Outlives Its Relevance …. It deserves a Graceful Sunset for the success of the next one

 

Organisations are generally good at starting transformations. They know how to launch programs, announce aspirations, appoint sponsors, create steering committees, engage partners, design roadmaps, allocate budgets, and communicate with bold intent. 

The language of beginnings is familiar: digital-first, future-ready, agile, resilient, customer-centric, AI-enabled, globally competitive, sustainable, simplified, transformed.

But organizations are far less comfortable dealing with another equally important and frequently emerging question:

What to do when a transformation no longer deserves to continue?

Not because the original ambition was wrong. Not because the people involved failed. Not even because the transformation produced no value.  But because the assumptions that shaped the chosen path have changed.

And this question is becoming increasingly urgent.

The rise of AI is redrawing the economics of work. Supply chains are being redesigned around resilience, redundancy, and regionalization. Geopolitical tensions are influencing technology choices. Organizations are revisiting questions of self-reliance, sovereignty, data localization, vendor dependence, and strategic autonomy. Business models that appeared compelling a few years ago are being re-examined in light of new risks and possibilities.

In such an environment, many ongoing transformation programs may not be wrong in their purpose but outdated in their design.  They may not be able to withstand the honest question: 

If we were not already doing this, would we start this program today?

And relevance decay is the new risk that traditionalprogram governance structures are not designed to handle. 

This powerful question moves the discussion away from sunk cost and toward current relevance. It separates loyalty to the original ambition from attachment to the original vehicle. It allows leaders to ask whether a program should be accelerated, repositioned, merged, paused, or consciously closed. 

Any honest assessment of transformation portfolio will throw-up some programs that deserve closure before they consume more attention and resources. 

How Leadership manage these closure candidates matters a lot!

The convenient response!

Organizations often choose a softer path.  They do not cancel the program.

They simply reduce its feed.

Budgets reduce. Reviews become infrequent. Resources move elsewhere. Leadership attention shifts to the next priority. Teams sense the loss of sponsorship before anyone formally acknowledges it.

So the program is not officially cancelled. It is simply deprived of oxygen.

This quiet starvation feels convenient because it avoids a hard conversation. But it carries a deeper cost, because when leaders do not explain what has ended, people construct their own explanations — and those are rarely as generous as leadership would have intended. 

The program is never formally closed, so its lessons are never formally captured. It simply fades, taking its learning and its goodwill with it.

The emotional residue matters more than many leaders realise.

Employees lose trust in future announcements; teams become reluctant to emotionally commit again, middle managers learn that priorities are temporary, and future programs inherit accumulated skepticism.

The next transformation program does not start with hope. It starts with memory.

Why Leaders Choose Silence?

The answer is rarely lack of intelligence.  It is usually a combination of psychology, politics, identity, and organizational discomfort.

Grace framework recognizes five structural forces push leaders toward slow starvation rather than explicit closure.

1. Sunk cost entrenchment: The program has consumed capital, goodwill, and political credit. Acknowledging failure means writing off those costs publicly. The instinct is to keep the program nominally alive while quietly withdrawing resources, preserving the fiction that something may yet be salvaged.

2. The accountability vacuum: Transformation programs have clear ownership of delivery. Almost no organisation assigns  explicit ownership of termination. When the closure decision belongs to no one specifically, it belongs to no one at all. Theprogram enters a state of distributed neglect.

3. Personal reputational exposure: The sponsor of a program is personally associated with its ambition.Terminating it on their watch risks being read as an admission of poor judgment. The game-theory outcome is coalition silence: each member privately knows the program is failing, but none will move first.

4. The new initiative provides cover: When a new priority emerges, it is convenient to let the old program die by distraction rather than decision. Resources migrate. No one formally closes what no one formally abandons. The program becomes vestigial.

5. The program as organisational symbol: Some programs acquire symbolic weight entirely separate from their instrumental value. Terminating them feels — and is sometimes experienced by others — as an act of cultural destruction. Closing it disrupts a narrative without offering a replacement.

A graceful sunset is possible 

Organizations that handle closure well tend to focus on the following three areas: 

1. Emphasize that the WHY survives, while HOW expires: 

If leaders have been doing “Why sharing” of the program well, explaining closure becomes easy. Much of the difficulty around closure comes from a confusion between the program and the purpose. Organizations assume that stopping the initiative means abandoning the ambition. Usually it does not.

Business may still need speed, the customer may still need a better experience, the enterprise may still need resilience. What has changed is the path.

A transformation is a means, not an end — and one of the quieter disciplines of transformation leadership is ensuring that people are committed to the purpose, not imprisoned by the program.

2. Acknowledge learning and separate it from embarrassment

Graceful closure should document and commit to memory: What the Program Leaves Behind.  A program may fail as an implementation vehicle but succeed as a learning vehicle.

A technology program leaves platforms, data, architecture decisions, and vendor relationships — its closure needs asset harvesting. A process program leaves routines, controls, and managerial habits — it needs learning consolidation. A talent program leaves expectations, trust, and emotional investment — it needs careful redeployment and honest communication. A culture program leaves beliefs, language, and identity — it needs the preservation of meaning.

The residue differs, by the program, bum us answer the question: 

What must survive this closure?

Framed that way, closure stops being an act of subtractionand becomes an act of stewardship — deciding deliberately what to carry forward rather than lettingeverything dissolve by neglect.

3. Honour contributors: Stand the People Test 

There is one signal that reveals, more honestly than any town hall or strategy deck, how an organization truly treats transformation outcomes: what happens to the people associated with a discontinued program.

If a program closes and the people who carried it are quietly sidelined, if sponsors are embarrassed andcontributors are left to explain the outcome defensively, the organization has taught its most capable people a precise and lasting lesson: transformation risk is career risk, and the next difficult initiative is not worth volunteering for. 

But if contribution is acknowledged, talent is redeployed with respect, and learning is visibly valued, the message is the opposite — that difficult transformation work is honored here, even when the path changes.

Those who carried a discontinued program become the organisations memory. They become either its future champions or its future cynics, and they shape the corridor conversations and the emotional climate around every initiative that follows. 

A graceful sunset is not complete until the peopledimension has been handled with dignity. Organizationsthat erase contributors create fear.  Organizations that honour contributors create resilience.

Transformations Closure design respects Context

Formal closure does not require theatrical communication.  It requires thoughtful communication.  The goal is not to dramatize the ending. Nor is it to hide it behind vague language.

As mature leaders, closure management execution must be calibrated to the specific context in which the organisation operates. A graceful sunset in a family-owned business requires different emphasis from one in a publicly listed conglomerate. 

A closure by a new CEO carries different permissions and risks from one executed by the CEO who launched the program. An Asian-origin firm requires cultural coding that a Western firm does not. Most importantly, the state of business decides the level of accommodation for such public acknowledgement of closure.

In an age shaped by AI disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, supply-chain redesign, sovereign technology choices, and accelerated business model shifts, more transformations will outlive the assumptions that created them.

Organizations must learn how to close one chapter without damaging belief in the next.

A graceful sunset is not surrender.  It is stewardship.

And perhaps that is what sustaining relevance ultimately requires:

Not only the courage to begin transformation, but also the wisdom to end, redirect, and renew it without leaving scars that the future must carry.

Machine Human collaboration path starts with defining guidelines

Humans are in the driving seat, so get to decide the rules of the collaboration setting. However, as the arrangement evolves, machines may also start taking autonomous execution and restricts flexibility.  

   

Overarching principles and design guidelines 

1. At all times, HR has to be aligned with business goals and organisational stated values.  Talent is a key strategic asset, and its acquisition, growth, deployment for business goals is the core non-negotiable accountability.
2. Building a positive work environment, with shred sense of equity and fairness to maximize productivity and satisfaction remains core.  
3. Accountability towards Legal, ethical, and policy compliance across geographies, especially in multi-sector environments, is non-negotiable.
4. All decisions recommended by Machines (AI) should be explainable and may require human review — especially in critical or ethical contexts. 
5. There should be Intelligence-Led Decisioning ie decisions to be informed by predictive insights, prescriptive analytics, and scenario modeling provided by machines.
6. Agent-Led Execution of the repetitive and logic-based tasks. There is openness to redefine the present processes, workflows and decision rights to make tasks amenable to agent led delivery.  
7. Continually strive towards hyper-personalisation, based on profile, experience, interest, intent, and opportunity capture
8. High standards of Digital Ethics and Transparency supported by Clearly define data boundaries, model transparency, and ethical standards for use of employee data and AI-led decisions
9. Modular & Platform-Based Architecture, allowing for easy integrations with other systems and introduce agents. 
10. Reimagination and experimentation approach supported by feedback loops to continue evolving and moving on the evolution trajectory
11. Pace and realm of transition to accommodate employee's adaption challenges, keeping intact trust while managing negative associations like privacy concerns, algorithimic bias or over de-humanisation. 
12. There is always human escalation path available for any automated processes.      

Translating these principles and guidelines into action would require setting up new institutional structures like joint ethics and governance committees and cross functional teams, enhanced role of CHRO, CDOs and other leaders.  

Besides, this would require reimagining of the role of HR workforce as they share their work with machines going forward.       

When did you review Management Processes last?

Mostly, I hear Organization Leaders involved in evaluation of business strategies, competitive positioning, financial plans, operational processes, technological assets and organization structure, but seldom undertaking conscious review of Management Processes. My contention is that well aligned and oiled Management Processes have far greater impact in achieving effectiveness of business strategies and efficiency gains of operational initiatives, then traditionally given attention to.

Three key Management Processes; Information Management process, Decision Making process, and Communication process are essential part of organization machinery and once established tend to have life of their own. Unless their robustness and alignment with overall business strategy and execution plan are ascertained, they have the potential to undermine other efforts of enhancing organization performance.


Technological Innovation and Gen-Y employees orientation demands and make possible complete reconfiguring of these Management Processes from the traditional way these were handled. Let us consider some questions that may help review each of these processes:

Information Management process:

Are we tapping all kind of internal and external sources of information that can help make sense of the complex world? How many of innovative ideas are coming from outside the company (say customers)?

Are we able to derive actionable insights/ foresights out of all the information that we have access to? How much of unstructured data on the web is mined to understand what our customers/ stakeholders liked about Company (products and pronouncements) last week?

Are we ensuring that all those who have to act, use the same set of information and the most recent one? How many customer interlocks across the organization are informed by unified understanding of customer preferences, and interaction history?

Decision Making process:

Are the decisions that are centralized, emerging out of conscious assessment of gains in the form of consistent and effective roll-out or out of power concentration or tradition? When was the debate (experiment) to decentralize some decisions undertaken last?

Are managers consciously selecting the right decision making process (collective or individual) based on context or one style in predominant as part of organization culture? How well understood are the accountability norms related to joint decision making?

Are leaders balancing the intuitive and insight (data backed) based decision making? How often intuitive decisions are betted for experimentation, then waiting for additional data backed evidence?

Communication process:

Are leaders across the organization only telling orders or explaining rationales as well, to facilitate execution? To what extent, leaders are open to questioning existing practices and ready to listen and debate from say new hires or interns?

To what extent, communication networks, formal and informal, are supportive of positive collaboration and partnering across silos? What percent of email traffic for middle managers are with colleagues other than immediate bosses or subordinates?

Are we using new channels of communication that are symbolic of interconnected social age? How strategically are we using twitters, blogs, web 2.0 technologies to connect, convey and correspond effectively and coherently across the stakeholder community?

Review of the Management processes facilitated by above questions will surely throw-up some areas that need to change. Change in Management processes require intervention design, comprising leadership sensitization & coaching, and creating new technological infrastructure besides sustained monitoring, till new processes become institutionalized. Not an easy task, but worth it.

Lets Reflect!!!

You can also visit the adjacent poll to express your opinion and see what others are thinking.

Leaders : Reboot your approach

Hi,

Thanks for reflecting your views on the previous post. Here are some of my reflections. 

I think, the difference lies in the approach towards some of the key leadership functions.

Lets take some examples:

1. Approach to “being accepted”: Leaders can no longer rely on Hierarchy to get acceptability. It is leader’s personal expertise and recognized excellence in an area of business value, which followers believe deserve respect and worthy of providing platform to lead. 
2. Approach to “being heard”: Directive style memos don’t work anymore beyond minimal compliance. Two way dialogue, that is authentic, persuasive, consistent across channels while being open to questioning with leader as facilitator and final integrator of views seems to work. 
3. Approach to “getting things done”: It is no more about detailed instructions about “how” it is to be done, but greater focus on telling “what needs to be done’ and “why it is important?” 
4. Approach to “getting best out of those led”: Traditional means of Motivating them to do what they are not convinced about, wont work. Connect work to their passion and then work relentlessly to avoid organization bureaucracy, and politics act as de-motivating distractions. 
5. Approach to “handling failures”: Instead of being criticized for being careless and unprofessional, leaders are expected to emphasize upon lessons learnt and may celebrate the well intentioned experimentations.

What other approaches need to change?

Lets Reflect!