ServiceNow, a Product not a Project

Are you built to produce value?

I have been blessed with the opportunity to interface with some of our country’s greatest innovation companies of all sizes, with many of them hyper focused on creating a competitive edge through their digital programs.  I have also seen so many of these organizations invest in enterprise platforms and struggle to produce the value they wish to achieve.  There is one thing that all of these scenarios have in common, it wasn’t the technology!

Take the rocket ship platform, ServiceNow for instance.  As a platform, ServiceNow has so few limits in what it can do and produce from a technology perspective, and yet so many treat the platform as a legacy technology tool, owned by a siloed IT application owner, and maintained by internal administrators that squarely focus on IT for IT.  

As a platform, ServiceNow has a range of scoped applications assisting the enterprise in swiftly transforming service delivery across enterprise service centers, while providing additional capabilities to automate through workflow and integration to the platform.  To boot, ServiceNow has the ability to also build custom applications, and now you have a digital giant built for speed and agility.  

Embracing the Mindset!

In my engagement with customers, the variable between success and mediocracy is the mindset.  The organizations who embrace a “Growth Mindset” and focus on producing a value driven product, are the ones that have the most success in achieving the originally intended goals of transformation. 

The starting point in this shift to embrace the Growth Mindset is defining what business success metrics are and identifying the business users & the problems to solve.  As a product engagement team, the focus needs to be on product-based growth, engagement, and user retainment

While the ServiceNow platform produces many pre-defined scoped applications, the engagement really succeeds or fails in the day 2 aspects; defined as capability adoption, growing the user population & feature set, improving the engagement model, and retaining the product users over time.

ServiceNow & Digital Product Engagement

Now let’s look at the model I referenced above, where the core Product Team is typically being told what projects they need to focus on with the platform or what to fix.  In this model, value is only being delivered based on what is a known need, this known requirement set comes in the form of demand; be it the squeaky wheel or through highest authority.  The miss here is the lack of Product Management or Product Pipeline control, this looks more like your outdated SDLC models of Identify & Experiment.  

If an organization is truly bought into a Growth Mindset, the need for identifying the unknown needs of the business far out way the known.  The trick is figuring out those needs!  To get to that level it becomes a race for data, this early investment stage focuses on product dependency.  Creating a dependency model within the organization surrounding the usage of ServiceNow as a platform creates a path to storing and housing value, or in this case, data.  

Earlier I mentioned the product focus being Grow, Engage, and Retain; the only way to hit these three targets is to produce Habits for user interaction on the platform.  How can we as a product development & management team create these unconscious impulses, self-prompting users to engage with ServiceNow? The key step here, we need to design in a way that we connect a user problem with our platform solution, do this at a high enough frequency and you have formed the almighty “Habit”.

Investing your time to focus on critical areas like:

-       Who are my habitual users?  At what frequency do they interact with our product(s)?

-       How did these habitual users engage our product(s)?

-       What modifications can we make to the product to replicate this experience to increase the habitual user count, and frequency?

This focus leads to the highest level of value delivered success!  

Investment in the Engagement Team and Building Value Propositions

As you can see, having a product & growth mindset requires a different team alignment than the one in my opening statements.  Where the build and the platform knowledge are critical, the achievement of delivering value has little to do with the knowledge the team has on creating the workflow, but how to identify, grow, and engage habitual users.  This requires a model that leverages a managed build team, aligned to a product management team focused on data driven decisions, feedback, and customer interaction.  

In the managed model, you create focus on things that you wouldn’t have time for in an internal only model, areas that are critical to product success; these being adoption & growth.

Product Success Measurement is an underutilized capability of the ServiceNow platform.  As a ServiceNow Product Manager you have great visibility to data that can showcase how the product is doing.  The problem is knowing where to start.  Don’t over think this, keep it simple and start with the basics, you can build from this foundation.  

Some basic product measurements can be analytics surrounding:

-       Number of users utilizing the system

-       Number of notifications

-       Number of tasks created

-       Volume of new records

These reported metrics show you the trends that prove out how you are growing habitual users, engagement, and where the product is with retainment.

Managing to a metric or generating a baseline is critical in helping with Product Funding.  We all know that we get funding through proving out value, but very few understand the art of “Creating the Value Hypothesis”.  A value hypothesis by definition is fairly simple, it tests if a product is valuable to potential customers.  It is the practical usage where the art comes in! 

Within the enterprise, it is not solely good enough to build something that supports what the consumer’s ask and provide that specific value.  With so many seeking funding for initiatives or product development, we have to both solve the consumer issue and align & attach this problem resolution to how the business/enterprise would benefit.

Close Out

In closing, as a ServiceNow owner, rethink the model.  Not all organizations are ready to adopt these concepts entirely, but every organization is primed to begin the foundational stages of the adoption process.  Be the spark to light the fire!