Deliver Digital Products at Scale

Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

Analyst Perspective

Product families align enterprise goals to product changes and value realization.

Our world is changing faster than ever, and the need for business agility continues to grow. Organizations are shifting from long-term project delivery to smaller, iterative product delivery models to be able to embrace change and respond to challenges and opportunities faster.

Unfortunately, many organizations focus on product delivery at the tactical level. Product teams may be individually successful, but how well are their changes aligned to division and enterprise goals and priorities?

Grouping products into operationally aligned families is key to delivering the right value to the right stakeholders at the right time.

Product families translate enterprise goals, constraints, and priorities down to the individual product level so product owners can make better decisions and more effectively manage their roadmaps and backlogs. By scaling products into families and using product family roadmaps to align product roadmaps, product owners can deliver the capabilities that allow organizations to reach their goals.

In this blueprint, we’ll provide the tools and guidance to help you define what “product” means to your organization, use scaling patterns to build product families, align product and product family roadmaps, and identify impacts to your delivery and organizational design models.

Banu Raghuraman, Ari Glaizel, and Hans Eckman

Applications Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Deliver Digital Products at Scale

Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Products are the lifeblood of an organization. They deliver the capabilities needed to deliver value to customers, internal users, and stakeholders.
• The shift to becoming a product organization is intended to continually increase the value you provide to the broader organization as you grow and evolve.
• You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.

Common Obstacles

• IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This conflicts with product delivery, which continuously delivers value over the lifetime of a product.
• Delivering multiple products together creates additional challenges because each product has its own pedigree, history, and goals.
• Product owners struggle to prioritize changes to deliver product value. This creates a gap and conflict between product and enterprise goals.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Info-Tech’s approach will guide you through:

• Understanding the importance of product families in scaling product delivery.
• Defining products in your context and organizing products into operational families.
• Using product family roadmaps to align product roadmaps to enterprise goals and priorities.
• Evaluating the different approaches to improve your product family delivery pipelines and milestones.

Info-Tech Insight

Changes can only be made at the individual product or service level. To achieve enterprise goals and priorities, organizations needed to organize and scale products into operational families. This structure allows product managers to translate goals and constraints to the product level and allows product owners to deliver changes that support enabling capabilities. In this blueprint, we’ll help you define your products, scale them using the best patterns, and align your roadmaps and delivery models to improve throughput and value delivery.

Info-Tech’s approach

Operationally align product delivery to enterprise goals

The Info-Tech difference:

1. Start by piloting product families to determine which approaches work best for your organization.
2. Create a common definition of what a product is and identify products in your inventory.
3. Use scaling patterns to build operationally aligned product families.
4. Develop a roadmap strategy to align families and products to enterprise goals and priorities.
5. Use products and families to evaluate delivery and organizational design improvements.

Deliver Digital Products at Scale via Enterprise Product Families

Product does not mean the same thing to everyone

Do not expect a universal definition of products.

Every organization and industry has a different definition of what a product is. Organizations structure their people, processes, and technologies according to their definition of the products they manage. Conflicting product definitions between teams increase confusion and misalignment of product roadmaps.

“A product [is] something (physical or not) that is created through a process and that provides benefits to a market.”

- Mike Cohn, Founding Member of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance

“A product is something ... that is created and then made available to customers, usually with a distinct name or order number.”

- TechTarget

“A product is the physical object ... , software or service from which customer gets direct utility plus a number of other factors, services, and perceptions that make the product useful, desirable [and] convenient.”

- Mark Curphey

Organizations need a common understanding of what a product is and how it pertains to the business. This understanding needs to be accepted across the organization.

“There is not a lot of guidance in the industry on how to define [products]. This is dangerous because what will happen is that product backlogs will be formed in too many areas. All that does is create dependencies and coordination across teams … and backlogs.”

– Chad Beier, "How Do You Define a Product?” Scrum.org

What is a product?

“A tangible solution, tool, or service (physical or digital) that enables the long-term and evolving delivery of value to customers and stakeholders based on business and user requirements.”

Info-Tech Insight

A proper definition of product recognizes three key facts:

1. Products are long-term endeavors that don’t end after the project finishes.
2. Products are not just “apps” but can be software or services that drive the delivery of value.
3. There is more than one stakeholder group that derives value from the product or service.

Products and services share the same foundation and best practices

For the purpose of this blueprint, product/service and product owner/service owner are used interchangeably. Product is used for consistency but would apply to services as well.

Product = Service

“Product” and “service” are terms that each organization needs to define to fit its culture and customers (internal and external). The most important aspect is consistent use and understanding of:

• External products
• Internal products
• External services
• Internal services
• Products as a service (PaaS)
• Productizing services (SaaS)

Recognize the different product owner perspectives

Business:

• Customer facing, revenue generating

Technical:

• IT systems and tools

Operations:

• Keep the lights on processes

Info-Tech Best Practice

Product owners must translate needs and constraints from their perspective into the language of their audience. Kathy Borneman, Digital Product Owner at SunTrust Bank, noted the challenges of finding a common language between lines of business and IT (e.g. what is a unit?).

Info-Tech Insight

Recognize that product owners represent one of three primary perspectives. Although all share the same capabilities, how they approach their responsibilities is influenced by their perspective.

“A Product Owner in its most beneficial form acts like an Entrepreneur, like a 'mini-CEO'. The Product Owner is someone who really 'owns' the product.”

– Robbin Schuurman, “Tips for Starting Product Owners”

Identify the differences between a project-centric and a product-centric organization

Info-Tech Insight

Product delivery requires significant shifts in the way you complete development work and deliver value to your users. Make the changes that support improving end-user value and enterprise alignment.

Projects can be a mechanism for delivering product changes and improvements

Projects within products

Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a product-based or project-based shop, the same basic principles should apply. The purpose of projects is to deliver the scope of a product release. The shift to product delivery leverages a product roadmap and backlog as the mechanism for defining and managing the scope of the release. Eventually, teams progress to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) where they can release on demand or as scheduled, requiring org change management.

Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy

In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?""

Info-Tech Insight

The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.

Use Agile DevOps principles to expedite product-centric delivery and management

Delivering products does not necessarily require an Agile DevOps mindset. However, Agile methods facilitate the journey because product thinking is baked into them.

Based on: Ambysoft, 2018

Organizations start with Waterfall to improve the predictable delivery of product features.

Iterative development shifts the focus from delivery of features to delivery of user value.

Agile further shifts delivery to consider ROI. Often, the highest-value backlog items aren’t the ones with the highest ROI.

Lean and DevOps improve your delivery pipeline by providing full integration between product owners, development teams, and operations.

CI/CD reduces time in process by allowing release on demand and simplifying release and support activities.

Although teams will adopt parts of all these stages during their journey, it isn’t until you’ve adopted a fully integrated delivery chain that you’ve become product centric.

Scale products into related families to improve value delivery and alignment

Defining product families builds a network of related products into coordinated value delivery streams.

“As with basic product management, scaling an organization is all about articulating the vision and communicating it effectively. Using a well-defined framework helps you align the growth of your organization with that of the company. In fact, how the product organization is structured is very helpful in driving the vision of what you as a product company are going to do.”

– Rich Mironov, Mironov Consulting

Product families translate enterprise goals into value-enabling capabilities

Info-Tech Insight

Your organizational goals and strategy are achieved through capabilities that deliver value. Your product hierarchy is the mechanism to translate enterprise goals, priorities, and constraints down to the product level where changes can be made.

Arrange product families by operational groups, not solely by your org chart

1. To align product changes with enterprise goals and priorities, you need to organize your products into operational groups based on the capabilities or business functions the product and family support.

2. Product managers translate these goals, priorities, and constraints into their product families, so they are actionable at the next level, whether that level is another product family or products implementing enhancements to meet these goals.

3. The product family manager ensures that the product changes enhance the capabilities that allow you to realize your product family, division, and enterprise goals.

4. Enabling capabilities realize value and help reach your goals, which then drives your next set of enterprise goals and strategy.

Approach alignment from both directions, validating by the opposite way

Defining your product families is not a one-way street. Often, we start from either the top or the bottom depending on our scaling principles. We use multiple patterns to find the best arrangement and grouping of our products and families.

It may be helpful to work partway, then approach your scaling from the opposite direction, meeting in the middle. This way you are taking advantage of the strengths in both approaches.

Once you have your proposed structure, validate the grouping by applying the principles from the opposite direction to ensure each product and family is in the best starting group.

As the needs of your organization change, you may need to realign your product families into your new business architecture and operational structure.

When to use: You have a business architecture defined or clear market/functional grouping of value streams.

When to use: You are starting from an Application Portfolio Management application inventory to build or validate application families.

Leverage patterns for scaling products

Organizing your products and families is easier when leveraging these grouping patterns. Each is explained in greater detail on the following slides