In today’s complex, ever-evolving enterprise IT environments, automation is no longer a luxury, but rather a foundational necessity. Yet, how we manage and deliver automation still lags behind its strategic potential. Let’s explore what happens when you apply product thinking to enterprise automation.
What is Product Thinking in Automation?
Product thinking involves treating what you deliver: Not just as a set of technical features, but as a curated experience that solves real business problems. For automation teams, that means stepping into the role of internal product managers. Rather than just delivering scripts, workflows, or triggers, they manage a portfolio of services.
It starts by identifying your internal “customers”: Developers, business units, compliance teams, and understanding what they’re trying to achieve. Product thinking forces the question: Are we solving the right problems with the right tools?
Managing Automation as a Portfolio
Thinking in products also means thinking in portfolios. An automation team’s offerings go beyond tooling. They include APIs, support services, SLAs, integrations, and domain expertise. Managing this portfolio involves three key responsibilities:
- Curation
Not every capability of an automation tool needs to be exposed. Just because your toolset supports APIs doesn’t mean you should open them up to every developer. Strategic curation ensures consistency, minimizes risk, and keeps automation aligned with enterprise goals. - Balancing Customization with Scale
You will receive requests for specialized services. Some you can fulfill, others you cannot. Product thinking means making conscious trade-offs: when to build bespoke solutions, when to steer stakeholders toward standardized offerings, and when to say “no.” - Lifecycle Management
Automation solutions, like any product, require active maintenance. That includes planning upgrades, avoiding deprecated software, and ensuring every piece in the automation puzzle remains secure and supportable.
In short, automation products have lifecycles. If you’re not managing them, they’re managing you.
Communication is a Core Capability
One of the most underdeveloped skills on automation teams is strategic communication. If you’re not regularly broadcasting what services you offer, how to access them, and what successes you’ve helped enable, you’re leaving value on the table.
When requests exceed your team’s capacity, it’s not just about saying “we need more resources”; it’s about showing the business impact of automation and making a compelling case to scale.
Your roadmap becomes your business case. It’s how you communicate not only what you’re doing, but why it matters.
Building a Strategic Automation Roadmap
To transition from a reactive support function to a proactive strategic partner, you need a roadmap. A visual representation of current priorities, near-term plans, and future investments gives you and your stakeholders a shared view of what’s coming.
The benefit isn’t just internal alignment. A clear, visual roadmap elevates your conversations with executives. You’re no longer explaining isolated projects, but you’re showing a plan.
Planning is Iterative, Not Annual
In many enterprises, “strategy” is a word reserved for once-a-year exercises involving external consultants. But in automation, planning needs to be more dynamic.
An iterative model responds best to this requirement:
- Identify key problems to solve
- Adjust your strategy accordingly
- Update your roadmap
- Communicate, syndicate, and seek approvals
- Execute and gather feedback
This approach ensures your roadmap is always relevant. And when new business initiatives arise – like a merger or product launch – you can respond swiftly by re-prioritizing automation investments.
Start Small: The Power of Pilots
If your team hasn’t yet adopted product thinking, a pilot is a smart starting point. Identify a small but meaningful feature or service, assemble a team, set clear goals and a timeline, and communicate before, during, and after.
Examples of automation pilots include:
- Providing business users with real-time access to dashboards and alerts
- Hosting weekly “office hours” for developers
- Using AI tools to improve internal documentation
Even modest pilots can reveal bottlenecks, inspire stakeholders, and build trust. Success breeds demand—and gives you the leverage to scale product thinking more broadly.
The Budget Conversation: Defend, Extend, or Upend
No strategy is complete without funding. At some point, you’ll need to make a case for more headcount or infrastructure. Why not apply Gartner’s strategic value framework? – Defend, Extend, or Upend.
- Defend: Requests that improve operational efficiency or meet regulatory needs. Important, but less likely to win new funding.
- Extend: Initiatives that help the business grow like launching in new regions or supporting multilingual operations.
- Upend: Transformative efforts that create entirely new markets or products. Rare, but powerful.
Understanding which bucket your initiative fits in helps you tailor your funding request and align it with executive priorities.
Final Thoughts
Automation isn’t just about technology, it’s about delivering business value consistently, predictably, and at scale. Product thinking transforms automation from a fragmented set of solutions into a strategic service portfolio. It helps you curate offerings, manage trade-offs, communicate better, and build a roadmap for long-term success.
Thanks to Dan Twing (from Enterprise Management Associaties) for an insightful Podcast on Enterprise Automation Intelligence that inspired this blogpost.
