Universities Transformed
How universities can introduce a culture of continuous innovation by adopting ‘The Product Operating Model’.
Universities exist in a rapid changing world and an increasingly tough economic environment. Now more than ever, they need to adapt to the changing needs of students and the world of work. They need to renew and reestablish their value proposition which, for the first time, is starting to be questioned and challenged by alternatives.
However, they are perhaps one of the hardest kinds of organisations to transform. Sometimes hundreds of years old with rich traditions, strong hierarchies and often a federated model of departments, schools and colleges, resistant to change.
They are heavily regulated with strong expectations placed on them. This makes it hard even for new challenger institutions. They are beholden to play by the same rules and earn the right to play (degree awarding powers).
Transformed
For over a decade, I’ve spent a significant amount of time working with higher education institutions adopting new technology and developing new products such as MOOCs, micro credentials and online degrees.
Recently, I was lucky enough to attend a workshop led by one of the product world’s most renowned thinkers, Marty Cagan on moving to the Product Operating Model. These workshops accompany his new book, Transformed.
The book and the workshops are designed to provide advice to companies who want to operate like ‘the best’ technology powered companies. Typically companies not born of the internet age.
I believe the principles he talks about are more broadly applicable to anyone interested in ensuring that their organisation is able to stay relevant and continue create products and experiences that people want, need and value.
Finding opportunities to try a new approach
I thought it would be helpful to reflect on Marty’s advice through the prism of the challenge of transforming a large legacy education institution. Both from the perspective of the technology that is increasingly powering their activities but more broadly how they develop and deliver the products they offer.
I’ve been privileged to see many of the approaches he describes put in to practice in this unique context and also played my own part in helping universities make this journey. I will reflect on some of these examples at the end.
It’s important to acknowledge that for most of these, there was a catalyst, a trend, a moment that produced the opportunities and incentives to make a change.
Sometimes, it is about seeing an opportunity. Sometimes, it is about the fear of a competitive threat. Often, it is a combination of the two.
It is also worth saying that for each example, they started out small but with big ambitions. And as smaller organisations were able to influence larger institutions. This is part of the formula.
My aim is to use Marty’s framework to help folks in established education institutions to reflect and evaluate where they are in their transformation journey. And, if they can seize a moment and opportunity, enable them to identify areas to focus their energies next. Even if, to begin with, it is about starting small and experimenting with taking a different approach to doing something new.
The Product Operating Model
Marty breaks the Product Operating Model down into three ‘dimensions’, five ‘concepts’ and four ‘competencies’.
There’s much to explore in each, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the three dimensions and the most general concept of ‘product culture’.
The dimension are:
Changing how you build
Changing how you solve problems
Changing how you to decide which problems to solve
As you work your way down the list, they typically become harder to change.
But they are also somewhat interdependent, so finding a discrete opportunity to create a ‘pilot team’ is generally the best place to start.
In terms of the definition of ‘product’, I’m thinking about this in the broadest sense: the overall student experience that might include the programmes they follow and the technology that enables it. I’ve written more about that here.
1. Changing how you build
From projects to products
The fundamental shift is moving from a projects model to a focus on products.
In many large organisations, and most universities, introducing new products or software is thought of as a project.
Typically you put a team together for a finite amount of time. They are are tasked with delivering a solution by a specific date, after which they are disbanded. Normally there is a process of gathering requirements, designing a solution and then launching it.
This has a number of problems.
To begin with it’s inefficient. A team takes time to form. They need to understand the problem and opportunity space in order to come up with innovate solutions. This also takes time. Often they are dictated a solution that is seen as safe, without being given the opportunity to explore different solutions and find the best one.
Almost never does the best solution emerge first time. It take multiple iterations. Each iteration helps the team learn. And yet project teams are normally given a window of time before the project launches and rarely given much time afterwards to get it right.
The team is then rolled off and on to something new, often resulting in any knowledge built up about the project going with them and effectively being lost. And because they are only responsible for delivering the project, the team are not incentivised to create ongoing solutions that are easy to maintain.
Sound familiar?
Moving to a product operating model is designed to help address these problems.
Instead of funding projects, you fund products. Or durable teams.
This is about committing to solving a problem or tackling an opportunity, rather than simply building a one off solution. This means forming a team that will have long term ownership of the opportunity. They can establish a working culture and build a deep knowledge of the problem space they are tackling.
They can release Minimum Viable Tests early to test and learn and continue to iterate and improve the product over a significant period of time.
And because they are also tasked with maintaining the solution, they are incentivised to create something that can be easily changed and improved. This means that no one has to unravel the spaghetti that is often left by a project team up against a deadline.
With a product, you can paint an inspiring vision and give people a sense of ownership in a way that is harder to do with a finite project. This often means you are able to find amazing people that are able to deliver more than they thought possible and deliver better outcomes.
Continuous improvement
The other big ‘how to build’ mindset change is about adopting continuous improvement, rather than ‘big bang’ releases.
Teams can rapidly test and learn and minimise risk by introducing changes that can be rolled back quickly if necessary. This enables them to move quickly and because the process is all about small regular changes, they can fix problems the moment they arise.
This is agile in the purest sense of the word. So many organisation say they are adopting agile without embracing the fundamental principle of small, low risk releases that allow you to learn quickly.
In the context of educational organisations, the speed of delivering new ways of doing things - and the associated learning - can be yearly or every semester/trimester at best. This makes the pace of change incredibly slow, lumpy and high risk.
It also means that often things simply don’t happen. With small regular changes you can create momentum.
This problem applies both to how software like the Virtual Learning Environment is developed and rolled out. But also and perhaps more fundamentally, about how courses and programmes are developed and improved.
The typical argument is that students would be unhappy with a lack of consistency. This is also the argument that was made in the world of software. In fact, users typically find big one off changes harder to deal with than lots of smaller changes.
Whilst there are challenges to navigate the quality requirements, developing the principles and culture of constant improvement better delivers on the overall objective of ensuring quality. This may mean rethinking quality checks and balances in such a way to enable to empower teams to keep improving quality and to do so more rapidly. And incentivising those responsible for maintaining quality to improve the outcomes that students genuinely care about rather than purely wishing to minimise regulatory risk.
2. Changing how you solve problems
Empowered cross-functional teams
The second dimension is about empowering teams to tackle problems and opportunities, rather than simply delivering solutions.
This means framing the challenge in terms of the outcomes, rather than the output. And then making the team responsible for delivering on the outcome. If you do this, they are more likely to find solutions that will genuinely be transformative for the institution and students.
To do this, the team needs:
The right sets skills and understanding of the problem/opportunity to be able to tackle it with a large degree of autonomy
A healthy and collaborative relationships with key stakeholders and faculty in order to ensure what they build works for the wider organisation
This means creating cross-functional teams of people that understand the context who are able to work as equals with specialists within the organisation in order to solve the problem. This is instead of being in service to them and being passed a solution.
This means addressing the power dynamic that often happens between academics and other parts of the organisation. Which might mean creating cross-functional teams that includes faculty.
If the team is set up and empowered in this way, they can quickly explore multiple ways to solve the problem and then pick the one that delivers the best outcomes.
There is a huge degree of craftsmanship and a great deal of unknowns involved in getting from an idea to a solution that works for both students and the organisation. This is often overlooked.
Continuous discovery
To find the best solutions, they also need to have the skills to be able to discover the opportunities and test different solutions. As well as a different set of skills, this requires a different mindset.
Helpfully, it is akin to the scientific method and doing research that should be familiar to many academics. It’s about developing hypothesises and testing solutions quickly with the people that will use them.
I’ve written more about continuous discovery for learning products here.
3. Changing how you decide which problems to solve
Student-centric
The starting point for the third dimension is to become genuinely student-centric. Developing a clear vision for the experience that you want to deliver to students, based on a deep understanding of their changing needs. If you do this well, it will help inspire people to embrace the challenge of doing something new in a new way.
Many universities say they are student-centric but often stops at the point it means challenging long held conventions or ways to organise the business. For example, challenging the idea of a long form degree programme delivered by specialist departments as lectures, seminars and readings.
Embracing disruption
To do this, you need to develop a mindset, culture and organisational structure that can embrace disruption. That is willing to disrupt itself, before it is disrupted by others.
In organisations with strong traditions and high levels of regulation, this is hard. The Innovator’s Dilemma on steroids. And there are likely to be grumbles and push back from some. People generally don’t enjoy change.
It is likely to require creating new organisational structures where this not only accepted but expected to challenge the status quo. These groups can start to demonstrate different ways of working that over time will become more accepted and normal.
Insight-driven, focused strategy
Then it’s about the hard job of deciding. To deliver change that delivers on the outcomes, the strategy must be focused. And it must be based on genuine and specific insights that the organisation can leverage to do something different and distinctive.
So many institutions have strategies are high level, vague and often very similar. Being ‘the best’ is not a strategy. You need to understand how you’re different. Ultimately, strategy needs to be about action. The execution is often constrained by a federated approach and vested interests protecting the status quo.
Leadership
To be able to deliver on the these three things requires backing from the top and real hands on leadership that can articulate a strong vision but also coach and empower their team. That can push on in the face of scepticism and objections.
There are few real examples I have seen close at hand of this, but when I have it has been impressive. These people lead with context and make it clear they are open to disruption and new approaches. I’ll give some well deserved shout outs in the examples at the end.
Product Culture and innovation
Alongside the three dimensions, it also worth touching on some of the fundamentals of a product culture within the Product Operating Model. It is these that potentially highlight the difficulty that universities have with adopting this kind of culture.
Principles over process
Or as Marty puts it, encouraging thinking, rather than mitigating risks.
As organisations grow, they tend to introduce more and more process to scale efficiently. The trouble is this tends to slow innovation and discourage critical thinking. He suggests that having strong principles that people can think through and apply - or be coached to apply - is a way of achieving consistency rather than stifling new thinking by having to slavishly follow a bureaucratic process.
I’ve seen both these approaches in action. When rules are followed because it’s the way it’s always been done or a project has to wait for the next committee meeting for the rubber stamp. But I’ve also seen situations where experts in quality are involved in conversations early to think through challenges from first principles. The latter always produces faster, better results for students.
Trust over control
This is the fundamental idea behind empowering product teams. It is hard in regulated organisations with strong hierarchies like universities. For this to work, teams need to include the right expertise and develop collaborative ways of working with stakeholders used to demanding specific solutions. This is about ensuring that teams have the right skills and are supported and coached in the right ways.
Innovation over predictability
Innovation is inherently risky. Most organisations as they get bigger, tend towards spending their time removing the potential for things to go wrong and trying to create output that is predictable. This is definitely true in the university context where avoiding making mistakes involving awarding student degrees and the health and safety of young people is understandably seen as paramount.
However, if predictability becomes the focus, the unintended consequence is missing the insights and opportunities to do something in a new way that is potentially better.
Learning over failure
Due to the high stakes nature of the business that universities are involved in, there is a tendency to avoid any form of failure. However, with zero failures, comes zero learning and zero innovation.
In order to create the potential for innovation, there needs to be some contexts where failure is acceptable. This might be about developing small scale experiments that are low stakes and can then de risk a full delivery of something more radical.
For example, running one module in a new way before rolling out a solution more widely.
Examples of successful HE transformation in action
I’ve been lucky enough to see a number of successful higher education transformations at close quarters. To stop the above sounding too theoretical, let’s see how some of the principles above have been put into practice by folks who have successfully driven innovation in this hardest of contexts.
Martin Bean, FutureLearn/The Open University and then RMIT Online
I was fortunate to be part of Martin’s team as he set up FutureLearn as a startup owned by The Open University and then later visit and provide some support to his team at RMIT Online.
In both examples, Martin created a new business unit that was empowered to do things differently, with a disruptive remit.
However, both were tasked with collaborating closely with the core business - as equals - in order to ensure that the solutions worked, met the appropriate measures of quality and drew upon the expertise of the parent organisation.
Both organised around building a product or products, rather than a one off projects. Both had leaders employed for the long term to build something new who were able to invest in a dedicated, cross-functional team: small at first and then bigger as they demonstrated success.
Beverley Oliver, Deakin Cloud Campus
Beverley Oliver of Australia’s pioneers of accessible higher education Deakin University painted a compelling vision of a ‘Cloud Campus’, focused on the needs of learners that didn’t want or couldn’t access a traditional campus based education.
She created a small internal cross-functional team that included specialists that understood the complexity of the quality regime and existing IT and were able to think it through from first principles.
The team set out to rapidly launch a minimum viable version of their first online degrees, building a module ahead of the one the students were currently studying and implementing improvements as they went.
Ian Dunn, Coventry Online
Like Martin at RMIT, Ian set up a separate new unit to deliver online degrees. This unit worked closely with FutureLearn as the delivery platform but built a new cross-functional team that included admissions, learning design and student success.
And like Beverly, he painted a compelling student-centric vision and created ways to start to bring this disruptive approach back into the core business to create greater flexibility for campus based students, something that pay dividends with the sudden emergence of Covid.
Ed Fidoe, The London Interdisciplinary School
A different example, is new entrant and challenger university The London Interdisciplinary School.
Founder Ed Fidoe set out a strong vision for a institution organised around problems, not subjects. He created a small interdisciplinary faculty recruited from leading universities to deliver it, led by Carl Gombrich who had run the interdisciplinary BASc programme at UCL and including Michael Englard a registrar adept at navigating the regulator and coaching the team on pragmatic approaches based on regulatory first principles.
Whilst recruiting their first students, they were delayed in opening by a year and took the opportunity to run various pilot courses including a ‘sprint’ of the first year over a few weeks. This helped them test and learn in a low risk setting before embarking on a new innovative three-year degree in a new organisation.
To summarise
Each of these examples helpfully bring to life the dimensions above.
Change how you build: invest in durable, cross-functional product teams - not project teams - that can continuously deliver, learn and iterate.
Change how you solve problems: empower these teams to deliver outcomes, not output in close collaboration with stakeholders and faculty rather than being in service to them. Ensure that they have the skills, resources and mindset to discover new solutions.
Change how you pick which problems to solve: start with a powerful, student-centric vision and embrace disruption. Drive change with a focused strategy, based on insights and lead with context. Inspire people with outcomes and incentivise them based on this outcome.
Plus the shift in culture.
Create a culture of innovation: champion principles over process and experiments that help you learn by accepting small failures. Be clear that for innovation to happen, it can’t be predictable and put trust in your team to deliver. This means changing some of the incentive structures that currently exist.
Finally, don’t try and do this all at once. Start with a small pilot team of some kind that focuses on a specific opportunity and enables you to experiment and demonstrate new ways of working.
If you’re interested in exploring Marty’s ideas more deeply, read Transformed. You can also subscribe to his newsletter and read articles at SVPG.
If you want help in implementing some of these ideas, I’m also available for coaching and advice. You can book an intro call here.
Thanks to Paul Emberlin and Chris Persson for feedback on the article.