I’ve recently guested a podcast and talked about Hemnet's journey in becoming a product-centered company. This made me really think back at what we have done and reflect on the key enablers of our product transformation. As I am a big fan of product in practice, I thought I would share the most important milestones of our journey, so that you hopefully can take some inspiration to start or continue yours.

A bit of background. For the ones who are not from Sweden, it is worth mentioning what Hemnet is. Hemnet is one of the world’s most popular property portals and one of Sweden’s most beloved products. Company-wise when I started in 2019 the company had around 70 employees and 5 product teams. We had a clear company strategy yet the execution of it was not completely in place. 

Fast forward 4 years and we have now proved that we have the organization in place to deliver on extremely business-critical initiatives,  with a really successful IPO in 2021 as the best example of that executional power. We have invested in the company and especially in product development and have now roughly 140 amazing brains working at Hemnet, of which 50% is dedicated to our 9 product development teams. And we scaled our ways of working for real, working with outcomes and continuous discovery at the heart of our product development.

So you might wonder now-how did we do it? Here are the critical enablers we had in our journey so far.

Support from the CEO

Looking back at our journey, this was the single most important enabler. At least for me. The trust and the empowerment came from the above, and in our case from our CEO. If she hadn’t seen an opportunity in working in a certain way, the rest of the journey would have been much harder.

So here is my first tip - if you are looking into transforming your company, or even the way you work in your team, you need buy-in from someone above who can be your sponsor. In my experience the best way of creating that buy-in is to start defining what you see doesn’t work in a way that your stakeholders understand and will bring benefit to them. And most importantly bring to that conversation a really concrete plan on how to bring that value fast. This brings me to the second key enabler

Focus first on execution and fast value delivery

Every transformation entails a share of uncertainty, so to mitigate the risk and increase the trust that you are given, you have to start demonstrating that all your theory really brings a concrete value.

This is exactly what unlocked our product transformation- proving that we could deliver faster and better by working in this new way.

This also meant that we did not start from the end goal, we did not start with outcome over output or with a product strategy. We started by putting execution in order. For us, that meant having a clear priority list in form of a common backlog to streamline execution and cross-team dependencies. 

What execution means is extremely contextual to the company, as well as a moving target. If you do everything correctly you will have to raise the bar continuously, and re-evaluate what is the most important thing to focus on.

To give you some more concrete inspiration these are the steps that we took. They are not mutually exclusive but as you can see, we built on what we had created, and always started from the biggest challenges in front of us.

1. What is your biggest challenge? Clearly state the most important things for the company and align them across the product organization. For us was really aligning everyone on the most important thing to deliver. The solution was a common cross-product development backlog which helped define what was the most important focus and why.
   We started with this when we had outputs and then transformed outputs into outcomes. Simple yet really impactful tool to solve dependencies and force a conversation about what is really important

2. Once priorities were clear, the next step was understanding what we should really put our focus on. Were we working on the right things to move the needle or just working? Product strategy came to the rescue. Defining a product strategy was a way to define which are the outcomes, and then the opportunities we really want to pursue.
   Our product strategy is formulated as a behavior that we want to make true and will bring customer and business value. Having that in place is a means for execution as you will always be able to go back and ask yourself “does this initiative support the behavior we want to drive or not”?  The product strategy helped us sort ideas, talk with stakeholders, and define focus.
   It is a powerful tool, yet use it with care. We also had some times when we were a little bit too black-and-white in applying the strategy and missed the nuances.

3. Priorities: check. Strategy: check. Customer-centric development: check. But how do you create a longer-term strategy with the uncertainty of discovery? We are testing connecting OKRs with product strategy and continuous discovery via business opportunities roadmaps.
   We use OKRs as a company-wide tool to set goals. Connecting OKR with the work done in the teams is one of the most empowering tools we have. We set a 3-year strategy connected with the behavior we want to drive (product strategy), we then yearly select some of the business opportunities that we think will best drive our company OKRs. These are our yearly roadmaps: a list of business opportunities that we believe will best drive our goals. Our roadmaps become the prototype of our strategy, where we start executing on assumptions and learning. Connecting the dots between the 3 years’ ambition, the learnings in the team, and the yearly OKR is really important to take good decisions on the strategy and creating buy-in.

Product People 

To succeed with a product transformation you really want to have people in the product organization that are passionate about a certain way of doing product development. Working outcome-focused, having the bigger picture in mind, and having the drive to deeply understand how you can solve customer problems to create company value is not for everyone.

Therefore It is important to have all these skills in mind when recruiting and make sure that your PM, UX, and developers all share the same product philosophy and thrive in it. Driving your product transformation you will set up processes and goals that require individuals in the product organization to engage in a certain way. And having a mismatch between structural incentives, and individual motivation is really suboptimal.

This will undoubtedly make your recruitment harder and longer, but it is worth every step of the way. Just remember to avoid the temptation of thinking that you can completely change someone’s mindset. If your team can handle it, you can hire on potential, but don’t expect people to change their intrinsic motivation.

Encourage a product culture 

Transformation requires not only support from the above, focus on execution, and people but ultimately a culture that sits in the walls.

And what do I mean by product culture? To me, it is a set of values and principles that are shared and allows everyone to work as their best self.

These things require time, and yet again are extremely contextual, but this is what has worked for us:

• Company values- describing what we expect from each other when working at Hemnet. Our values are something we always go back to and create a common denominator that is key for good cooperation.

• Having an article book club every week to discuss best practices. But more often than not these articles become a thought-starter to exchange ideas about what works and what doesn’t in our context.

• Transparency and constant sharing- going back to that simple backlog. Having priorities clear, documented, and communicated, was and still is a real game changer to be able to empower and push decisions to the teams. Another important aspect is having rituals for sharing insights about the business and the customers. We have a bi-weekly product demo, monthly OKRs follow-up, quarterly product objectives review, and customer insights sharing. All of these are open to the entire company.

• Trust in taking hard conversations. Some might call this psychological safety. To me is that atmosphere of trust that everyone has to pitch in and create. It is about all the above, but also being available, listening and acting on feedback, sharing one’s mistakes publicly, praising often, and ultimately creating the environment for differences of thoughts to thrive. I believe this is the most difficult thing to do, but also the most rewarding if done right. 

And this brings me to my last piece of advice…

Every revolution starts with one first step!

Our approach was not revolutionary from the beginning, but it really made an evolutionary impact on how we work that can really be seen from the time perspective. So what I really encourage you to think about is: what is the small step you can take today that can create a revolution later on?

How can you make execution better, alignment clearer, and wording closer to what you want to achieve? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your product transformation, but I assure you, starting to take some steps will bring you a long way!

If you want even more inspiration on how we concretely work with our key enablers, here are some further readings for you: 

• If you want more details about our transformational journey, this post is for you

• If you wonder how we set and defined our product strategy, watch this run-through at Product Management Conference

• If you want an idea of how we work on connecting strategy, OKRs, and roadmaps, this is our process

Good luck! And if you got inspired and decided to take any step, I would love to hear what you have done.