Mature and Scale Product Ownership

Strengthen the product owner’s role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.

Executive Brief

Analyst Perspective

Empower product owners throughout your organization.

Whether you manage a product or service, the fundamentals of good product ownership are the same. Organizations need to focus on three key elements of product ownership in order to be successful.

• Create an environment of empowerment and service leadership to reinforce product owners and product family managers as the true owners of the vision, improvement, and realized the value of their products.
• Align product and product family owner roles based on operational alignment and the groups defined when scaling product management.
• Develop your product owners to improve the quality of roadmaps, alignment to enterprise goals, and profit and loss (P&L) for each product or service.

By focusing the attention of the teammates serving in product owner or service owner roles, your organization will deliver value sooner and respond to change more effectively.

Hans Eckman

Principal Research Director – Application Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

There is no single correct approach to product ownership. Product ownership must be tuned and structured to meet the delivery needs of your organization and the teams it serves.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Product owners make the final decision

• Establish a foundation for empowerment and success
• Assign product owners and align with products and stakeholders
• Mature product owner capabilities and skills

The Info-Tech difference

1. Assign product owners where product decisions are needed, not to match org charts or delivery teams. The product owner has the final word on product decisions.
2. Organize product owners into related teams to ensure product capabilities delivered are aligned to enterprise strategy and goals.
3. Shared products and services must support the needs of many product owners with conflicting priorities. Shared service product owners must map and prioritize demand to align to enterprise priorities and goals.
4. All product owners share the same capability model.

Insight summary

There is no single correct approach to product ownership

Successful product management starts with empowerment and accountability. Product owners own the vision, roadmap, and value realization for their product or family aligned to enterprise goals and priorities.

Phase 1 insight

Product owners represent three primary perspectives: business (external-facing), technical (systems and tools), or operational (manual processes). Although all share the same capabilities, how they approach their responsibilities is influenced by their primary perspective.

Phase 2 insight

Start with your operational grouping of products and families, identifying where an owner is needed. Then, assign people to the products and families. The owner does not define the product or family.

Phase 3 insight

Product owners are operating under an incomplete understanding of the capabilities needed to succeed. Most product/service owners lack a complete picture of the needed capabilities, skills, and activities to successfully perform their roles.

Product and service ownership share the same foundation

The underlying capabilities and best practices to own and improve a product or service are identical for both roles. Use the terms that make the most sense for your culture.

Map product owner roles to your existing job titles

Identify where product management is needed and align expectations with existing roles. Successful product management does not require a dedicated job family.

Projects can be a mechanism for funding 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.

You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.

You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

Product and services owners share the same foundation and capabilities

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

Product = Service

Common foundations: Focus on continuous improvement, ROI, and value realization. Clear vision, goals, roadmap, and backlog.

“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 product owner perspectives

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

Info-Tech Insight

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?).

Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

Product ownership exists at the different operational tiers or levels in your product hierarchy. This does not imply a management relationship.

Product portfolio

Groups of product families within an overall value stream or capability grouping.

Project portfolio manager

Product family

A collection of related products. Products can be grouped along architectural, functional, operational, or experiential patterns.

Product family manager

Product

Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

Product owner

Info-Tech Insight

Define the current roles that will perform the product management function or define consistent role names to product owners and managers.

Align enterprise value through product families

Understand special circumstances

In Deliver Digital Products at Scale, products were grouped into families using Info-Tech’s five scaling patterns. Assigning owners to Enterprise Applications and Shared Services requires special consideration.

Value stream alignment

• Business architecture
  • Value stream
  • Capability
  • Function
• Market/customer segment
• Line of business (LoB)
• Example: Customer group > value stream > products

Enterprise applications

• Enabling capabilities
• Enterprise platforms
• Supporting apps
• Example: HR > Workday/Peoplesoft > Modules Supporting: Job board, healthcare administrator

Shared Services

• Organization of related services into service family
• Direct hierarchy does not necessarily exist within the family
• Examples: End-user support and ticketing, workflow and collaboration tools

Technical

• Domain grouping of IT infrastructure, platforms, apps, skills, or languages
• Often used in combination with Shared Services grouping or LoB-specific apps
• Examples: Java, .NET, low-code, database, network

Organizational alignment

• Used at higher levels of the organization where products are aligned under divisions
• Separation of product managers from organizational structure is no longer needed because the management team owns the product management role

Map sources of demand and influencers

Use the stakeholder analysis to define the key stakeholders and sources of demand for enterprise applications and shared services. Extend your mapping to include their stakeholders and influencers to uncover additional sources of demand and prioritization.

Info-Tech Insight

Your product owner map defines the influence landscape your product operates. It is every bit as important as the teams who enhance, support and operate your product directly.

Combine your product owner map with your stakeholder map to create a comprehensive view of influencers.

The primary value of the product owner is to fill the backlog with the highest ROI opportunities aligned with enterprise goals.

Info-Tech Insight

The product owner owns the direction of the product.

• Roadmap - Where are we going?
• Backlog - What changes are needed to get there?
• Product review - Did we get close enough?

Product delivery realizes value for your product family

While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

Product family owners are more strategic

When assigning resources, recognize that product family owners will need to be more strategic with their planning and alignment of child families and products.

Info-Tech Insight

Roadmaps for your product family are, by design, less detailed. This does not mean they aren’t actionable! Your product family roadmap should be able to communicate clear intentions around the future delivery of value in both the near and long term.

Connecting your product family roadmaps to product roadmaps

Your product and product family roadmaps should be connected at an artifact level that is common between both. Typically, this is done with capabilities, but it can be done at a more granular level if an understanding of capabilities isn’t available.

Develop a product owner stakeholder strategy

Stakeholders are a critical cornerstone to product ownership. They provide the context, alignment, and constraints that influence or control what a product owner can accomplish.

Product owners operate within a network of stakeholders who represent different perspectives within the organization.

First, product owners must identify members of their stakeholder network. Next, they should devise a strategy for managing stakeholders.

Without a stakeholder strategy, product owners will encounter obstacles, resistance, or unexpected changes.

Create a stakeholder network map to product roadmaps and prioritization

Follow the trail of breadcrumbs from your direct stakeholders to their influencers, to uncover hidden stakeholders.

Info-Tech Insight

Your stakeholder map defines the influence landscape your product operates. It is every bit as important as the teams who enhance, support and operate your product directly.

Use “connectors” to determine who may be influencing your direct stakeholders. They may not have any formal authority within the organization, but they may have informal yet substantive relationships with your stakeholders.

Being successful at Agile is more than about just doing Agile

The following represents the hard skills needed to “Do Agile”:

• Engineering skills. These are the skills and competencies required for building brand-new valuable software.
• Technician skills. These are the skills and competencies required for maintaining and operating the software delivered to stakeholders.
• Framework/Process skills. These are the specific knowledge skills required to support engineering or technician skills.
• Tools skills. This represents the software that helps you deliver other software.

While these are important, they are not the whole story. To effectively deliver software, we believe in the importance of being Agile over simply doing Agile.

Adapted from: “Doing Agile” Is Only Part of the Software Delivery Pie

Why focus on core skills?

They are the foundation to achieve business outcomes

The right skills development is only possible with proper assessment and alignment against outcomes.