True Change: Case Studies in Product Transformation
It’s easy to watch a keynote (maybe even one of the ones from Product at Heart?) and get inspired about concepts like the product operating model and other industry best practices. But knowing how to translate that inspiration into actual actionable tasks you and your team can carry out? That’s a lot harder!
And that was the idea behind this year’s Product at Heart themed sessions on True Change: Case Studies in Product Transformation. Product leaders, coaches, and practitioners stepped onto the stage to share some of the tough challenges they faced and some of the strategies that have helped them along the way.
By the way, in case you missed it, this year’s Product at Heart lineup featured four themed sessions:
True Change: Case Studies in Product Transformation
AI in Practice: Insights for the Road Ahead.
True Change: Case Studies in Product Transformation themed sessions were designed to help you see what transformation looks like in real life. What are some of the mistakes, missteps, and ultimately the successes that happen when teams adopt the product operating model?
This themed session featured three 20-minute talks. We heard from:
Anuar Chapur, Chief Product Officer at The Palace Company and Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor
Kirstine Østergaard Ploug Sørensen, Director and Head of Agile Product Management and Design CoE at Ørsted
Ronnie Varghese, Executive Leadership Coach & Advisor
In this post, we’ll share some highlights from each talk. If you’d like to explore any of the content in more detail, make sure you check out the recordings from each session.
Gabrielle and Anuar’s talk: Empowerment in Practice: Behind the Scenes of The Palace Company’s Transformation Journey
Kirstine’s talk: Product Transformation: When Your Product is a Transformation Your Customers May Hesitate to Purchase.
Ronnie’s talk: Almosafer's Transformation to the Product Operating Model: A Learning Organization Approach (From Feature Factory to Learning Organization)
Gabrielle Bufrem and Anuar Chapur: Empowerment in Practice: Behind the Scenes of the Palace Company’s Transformation Journey
Many product transformation stories tell the story of digital products, but can these concepts be applied in other industries and formats?
Anuar Chapur and Gabrielle Bufrem’s story shows that yes, this is entirely possible. Anuar is the CTO and Product Officer at The Palace Company, a family-owned luxury hospitality company with 15,000 employees—by no means a typical tech company.
Describing the initial state, Anuar explained that The Palace Company traditionally had a director of IT, a manager, and lots of engineers. When they were organized this way, they exceeded their timelines by months, had no real outcomes or results, and the entire IT department was seen as a cost center.
“We ended up building things that delivered zero to negative value and had low team morale,” says Anuar.
In an attempt to remedy the situation, they hired a new director who created an internal software factory, organized teams with product owners and project managers. “It looked like agile, but had a big waterfall behind it,” says Anuar. “It only looked like agile from afar.”
A failed attempt at transformation left The Palace Company’s IT team with even more problems than when they’d started.
But these changes meant that the IT department’s focus was on process, control, and predictability. This only deepened the divide between IT and “the business.”
At this stage, Anuar stepped in as the VP of IT. While he initially thought the problem was with the speed of delivery, Anuar quickly realized it was much bigger than that. “The real issue wasn’t speed but that the solution didn’t work for the client or the business,” Anuar explains.
It was around this time that Anuar began listening to Marty Cagan’s podcast and reading his books like Inspired andTransformed. After Anuar attended one of Marty’s in-person workshops, Marty introduced him to product coach Gabrielle Bufrem.
One of Gabrielle’s first steps was to identify a pilot team who could model a new, more empowered way of working. The idea was that if the pilot team was successful, they could be held up as a poster child and inspire the rest of the technology teams at The Palace Company to shift toward the product operating model on a larger scale.
One of Gabrielle’s first steps was putting together a pilot team—illustrated in the top right corner of this diagram. The idea was that cross-functional group could operate somewhat independently and become a success story to share across the broader IT org.
Once this pilot team had some initial success, Gabrielle helped Anuar and The Palace Company make a broader shift to the product operating model through steps like:
Changing how they build to small, frequent, continuous releases
Changing how they solve problems so teams get problems to solve instead of features to build and they focus on finding a solution that works for the business and the customer
Changing how they decide which problems to solve with a customer-centric product vision and an insight-driven product vision
Check out the full video to take a closer look at how Gabrielle helped Anuar transform the Palace Company’s technology department from a traditional IT cost center into an empowered product organization.
Kirstine Østergaard Ploug Sørensen: Product Transformation: When Your Product is a Transformation Your Customers May Hesitate to Purchase.
What happens when your product is a transformation—and your "customers" do not always want it?
In large-scale global organizations, like Ørsted, driving change isn’t just about push communication and training—it’s about delivering measurable business outcomes. It requires a sharp, strategic product management approach that shifts mindsets and behaviors toward sustainable adoption and impactful results.
In her talk, Kirstine shared how she’s leading product transformation at scale by focusing on value. And the tool that’s helping her achieve this is Martin Eriksson’s Decision Stack. The beauty of this framework is that it reminds us that saying no is strategic and we can gain clarity and focus from deciding what NOT to do. Plus, the Decision Stack connects everything to value, so it helps stakeholders understand why you’re making the decisions you are.
Martin Eriksson’s Decision Stack is the mental model that’s helping Kirstine guide transformation at Ørsted.
Kirstine has also linked strategy with Ørsted’s scaled agile delivery model in the version of the Decision Stack shown below.
Here’s a version of the Decision Stack that’s been adapted to Ørsted’s scaled agile delivery model.
Kirstine says this is one of the keys to transformation: Going out and telling people what it really means for them. Because strategy can be hard for people to wrap their heads around, try to ground these conversations in terms that will make sense to them, like roadmaps about opportunities. You may also want to work with different senior leaders on creating their own Decision Stacks to help them think in both the short and long term.
Be sure to check out Kirstine’s full talk to take a deeper dive into her tips for finding the right type of problem to solve, securing senior sponsorship, and getting the right people involved early to increase the chances of broad adoption.
Ronnie Varghese: Almosafer's Transformation to the Product Operating Model: A Learning Organization Approach (From Feature Factory to Learning Organization)
There’s a hard truth about transformation: If you’re not prepared to transform as a leader, there’s little chance that your organization will be able to successfully transform.
Ronnie Varghese quickly realized this when he took on the role as Head of Product at Almosafer. When he arrived, the org was a classic feature factory, shipping features without impact. People were disengaged and had little opportunity for growth and didn’t feel their work was making a difference.
When Ronnie arrived at Almosafer as Head of Product, he quickly realized that the org was operating as a classic feature factory. In addition to figuring out how to overcome this, he needed to confront his own impostor syndrome.
“I felt I was in over my head,” says Ronnie. Despite having success as a serial entrepreneur, founding and scaling many tech startups to acquisition, he had no formal product background, travel industry experience, or clear vision.
After some serious reflection, Ronnie realized that there was an opportunity in the challenge he was facing. He could reframe his experience as a paid scholarship—he was essentially being paid to learn.
With this mindset shift, Ronnie began to think of the product organization within Almosafer as a montessori—a school where students learn as they’re playing. Only instead of being for children, this one was for product people.
Some of the concepts that helped guide Ronnie’s thinking included thinking of himself as a coach; building psychological safety in addition to learner, contributor, and challenger safety; and designing teams, systems, and processes for learning.
Thinking of himself as a coach was key to Ronnie’s transformation efforts. Here are a few of the coaching principles that guided his work.
Tune in to Ronnie’s full talk to learn how he brought these coaching principles to life and explore the results his team was able to achieve, including a 28+% uplift in conversion and the ability to innovate and adapt during a business-threatening crisis.
Want to dive deeper into any of the topics from Product at Heart? Make sure you check out our blog and video archive!