Developing good software products is, first and foremost, about making good business decisions. Even when you make the right decision, though, executing on it can be a challenge for most organizations.

Executive leadership and Product strategy typically desire to provide software-based business offerings that stand the test of time, in that they are evolved continuously to meet the market needs. For this, they need a software development engine that is capable of bringing that vision to fruition in an efficient and timely manner. However, most attempts at adopting the latest "agile" frameworks result in the opposite.

Successful and sustainable software product development requires a wholistic approach that involves everything from the executive funding and progress-tracking model to developer skills like refactoring and test-driven development. That approach must leverage technical product management and a well-curated graph of business capabilities to put the business decisions first, with all other considerations being secondary.

It doesn't matter how efficiently Engineering completes a task it never should have done and "rogue" efforts tend to plague most software product development organizations. To ensure all work is aligned with executive intent, an organization must become not only "Product-led" but Product-driven, with Product driving nearly all implementation activities.

Only once that has been realized, does efficiency matter. To ensure an enterprise is a "lean, mean, software-product-developing machine", you will need technical product managers, testers, and engineers to up their game significantly. This involves introducing state of the art software engineering concepts into the requirements-developers' skillset, as well as radically improving the refactoring, design, and test-automation skillsets of members of Engineering.

With decisions being reliably executed upon efficiently, the final step to building a software product development engine that can consistently deliver on executive vision is moving to a sustainable, product-oriented business model. The executive suite needs to make significant changes at the enterprise-level, including moving from project- to product-based funding, altering how goals are articulated and tracked, and abolishing software projects altogether. At the same time, Product will need to improve their ability to gather intelligence from the market and Engineering must establish a fast, clean, reliable flow of changes out to production environments.

This is what we, the authors of this book, believe. It is what we have seen and it is what we coach. We call it "The Producore Way" for two reasons: because it moves Product to be at the core of your enterprise and because we are shameless self-promoters.