Modern CRM Transformation - Part 7: Building a Sustainable CRM Product Organisation

Signal Boost: "Someone Great" by LCD Soundsystem
What’s lost and what remains! How to sustain the momentum and energy post-launch.

Go-live is not the finish line. It’s just the starting line.

I’ve seen it happen before:
The day after go-live, the energy fades ... Teams move on ... User feedback slows ... Improvements stall ... The CRM platform slowly becomes just another piece of IT infrastructure to "keep the lights on."

We didn’t want that.

We wanted a CRM platform that stayed alive, adapting, improving, and creating real business value year after year. That meant standing up a sustainable CRM Product Organisation.

Here’s how we did it.

From Programme to Product

The first mindset shift was simple but profound:

• Programmes are temporary — they deliver and disband.
• Products are permanent — they evolve and sustain.

Example:
In one past project I’d seen, delivery teams were disbanded after launch.
Six months later, no one could even remember why certain decisions had been made. Enhancements became slower. Bugs stayed unresolved. Momentum drained away.

We wanted the opposite.

Key change: Delivery teams didn’t disband after go-live. They became product teams.

Stable missions continued. Rolling roadmaps continued. User research continued.

Success was no longer measured by features shipped, but by business outcomes improved quarter after quarter.

Defining the CRM Product Organisation

We structured the organisation into two core layers:

1. Value Stream Product Teams

Each major business value stream had a dedicated CRM Product Team, for example:

• Customer Onboarding
• Customer Service and Support
• Partner Management
• Policy Administration

Each team included:

• A Product Manager
• Functional Consultants
• Engineers
• Analysts
• UX access (shared)
• QA access (shared)

Mission example:

"Continuously reduce customer onboarding time while improving user experience and compliance."

Ownership stayed stable even as business priorities evolved.

2. Platform Enablement Team

A dedicated team owned the Dynamics 365 core platform, integrations, and DevOps tooling.

Their responsibilities included:

• Managing technical debt
• Handling version upgrades
• Maintaining clean, scalable architecture
• Enabling value stream teams to build quickly and safely

Without this team, platform drift and decay would have been inevitable.

Example of drift:

• Customisations piling up without governance.
• Integrations built ad-hoc, breaking with each version upgrade.
• Technical debt accumulating until innovation slowed to a crawl.

Platform health needed ongoing stewardship, not just a one-off clean-up.

New Rhythms and New Measures

The Product Organisation needed its own rhythms and measures — different from the programme phase.

• Quarterly Product Reviews: Outcome-driven showcases of real impact.
• Continuous Backlog Grooming: Always ready for the next most valuable work.
• Rolling Roadmaps: Updated quarterly, visible six months out.
• Product Health Metrics: Outcome, Flow, Risk, Learning — still tracked and celebrated.

Example:
Post-go-live, we tracked onboarding time monthly — and reduced it from 10 days at launch to 5 days within nine months.

Success wasn't "keeping the system running." Success was continuously moving business outcomes and improving user experiences.

Challenges We Faced (and How We Adapted)

Shifting Sponsor Expectations:
Some leaders assumed post-go-live meant "done."
We re-educated leadership that platforms are living products, needing ongoing investment and evolution.

Resourcing Stability:
There was pressure to "release" people after launch.
We protected team stability by showing that losing product knowledge would slow down business improvement.

Priority Drift:
Without urgent programme deadlines, focus risked scattering.
We kept quarterly OKRs tightly anchored to business outcomes.

What It All Comes Down To

By treating CRM as a living product, not a finished project, we created:

• Faster adaptation to new business needs.
• Continuous improvement in user experience.
• Higher long-term return on CRM investment.
• Stronger, more consistent engagement from business stakeholders.

The platform stayed alive. Teams stayed energised. Business outcomes kept improving.

Transformation didn’t end at go-live. Transformation became a way of working
and the CRM platform became a living part of an adaptive, thriving business capability.

Next Up: Part 8: Leading a CRM Transformation with Heart and Adaptability.
Lessons learned from leading CRM change with empathy, resilience and clarity.