Make the Case for Product Delivery

• Products are the lifeblood of an organization. They deliver the capabilities needed to deliver value to customers, internal users, and stakeholders.
• Organizations are under pressure to align the value they provide with the organization’s goals and overall company vision.
• You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.

• IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This is in contention with product-centric delivery.
• Product delivery acknowledges the reality that solutions of all shapes and sizes deliver continual and evolving business value over their lifetime.
• 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 will enable you to build a proposal deck to make the case to your stakeholders for product-centric delivery.
• You will build this proposal deck by answering key questions about product-centric delivery so you can identify:
  • A common definition of product.
  • How this form of delivery differs from traditional project-centric approaches.
  • Key challenges and benefits.
  • The capabilities needed to effectively own products and deliver value.
  • What you are asking of stakeholders.
  • A roadmap of how to get started.

IT

1

IT, business, and customers work together through all stages of the product lifecycle, from market research through the roadmapping and delivery processes and into maintenance and retirement. The goal is to ensure the risks and dependencies are realized before work is committed.

Stakeholders, Customers, and Business

2

Prioritize high-value modes of communication to break down existing silos and create common understanding and alignment across functions. This approach increases transparency and visibility across the entire product lifecycle.

3

Explore methods to integrate the workflows, decision making, and toolsets among the business, IT, and customers. The goal is to become more reactive to changes in business and customer expectations and more proactive about market trends.

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.

• Features (on their own)
• Transactions
• Unstructured data
• One-time solutions
• Non-repeatable processes
• Solutions that have no users or consumers
• People or teams

• Has end users or consumers
• Delivers quantifiable value
• Evolves or changes over time
• Has predictable delivery
• Has definable boundaries
• Has a cost to produce and operate

• Month-end SQL scripts to close the books
• Support Engineer doing a password reset
• Latest research project in R&D

• Self-service password reset portal
• Oracle ERP installation
• Microsoft Office 365

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

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.

• Lack of ownership

• Siloed departments

• Accountability

• Lack of ownership

• Siloed departments

• Accountability

• End-to-end ownership

Info-Tech Insight

People treat the assignment of accountability for products (aka product ownership) as optional. Without assigning accountability up front, your transition to product delivery will stall. Accountable individuals will be focused on the core outcome for product delivery, which is the delivery of the right value, at the right time, to the right people.

• Customer facing, revenue generating

• IT systems and tools

• Keep the lights on processes

• Backlog management and prioritization
• Epic/story definition, refinement in conjunction with business stakeholders
• Sprint planning with Scrum Master
• Working with Scrum Master to minimize disruption to team velocity
• Ensuring alignment between business and Scrum teams during sprints
• Profit and loss (P&L) product analysis and monitoring

• Product strategy, positioning, and messaging
• Product vision and product roadmap
• Competitive analysis and positioning
• New product innovation/definition
• Release timing and focus (release themes)
• Ongoing optimization of product-related marketing and sales activities
• P&L product analysis and monitoring

Consider some of the techniques you can use to validate your strategy.

Go to your backlog and prioritize the elements that need to be answered sooner rather than later.

Possible areas of focus:

• Regulatory requirements or questions to answer around accessibility, security, privacy.
• Stress testing any new processes against situations that may occur.

The completion of a set of artifacts dedicated to validating business opportunities and hypotheses.

Possible areas of focus:

• Align teams on product strategy prior to build
• Market research and analysis
• Dedicated feedback sessions
• Provide information on feature requirements

The completion of a set of key planning activities, typically the first sprint.

Possible areas of focus:

• Focus on technical verification to enable product development alignment
• Sign off on architectural questions or concerns

• Now
  What are you going to do now?
• Next
  What are you going to do very soon?
• Later
  What are you going to do in the future?

1. Identify what the critical steps are for the organization to embrace product-centric delivery.
2. Group each critical step by how soon you need to address it:
   • Now: Let’s do this ASAP.
   • Next: Sometime very soon, let’s do these things.
   • Later: Much further off in the distance, let’s consider these things.

Stakeholder Influence

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

Product teams operate within this network of stakeholders who represent different perspectives within the organization.

See the appendix for activities and guidance on how to devise a strategy for managing stakeholders.

Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

• Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.

Build a Better Product Owner

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

Build Your Agile Acceleration Roadmap

• Quickly assess the state of your Agile readiness and plan your path forward to higher value realization.

Implement Agile Practices That Work

• Improve collaboration and transparency with the business to minimize project failure.

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

• Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.

Deliver Digital Products at Scale

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

Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT

• Further the benefits of Agile by extending a scaled Agile framework to the business.

Build Your BizDevOps Playbook

• Embrace a team sport culture built around continuous business-IT collaboration to deliver great products.

Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline

• Shift security left to get into DevSecOps.

Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

• Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

Application Portfolio Management (APM) Research Center

• See an overview of the APM journey and how we can support the pieces in this journey.

Application Portfolio Management for Small Enterprises

• There is no one-size-fits-all rationalization. Tailor your framework to meet your goals.

Streamline Application Maintenance

• Effective maintenance ensures the long-term value of your applications.

Build an Application Rationalization Framework

• Manage your application portfolio to minimize risk and maximize value.

Modernize Your Applications

• Justify modernizing your application portfolio from both business and technical perspectives.

Review Your Application Strategy

• Ensure your applications enable your business strategy.

Application Portfolio Management Foundations

• Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.

Streamline Application Management

• Move beyond maintenance to ensuring exceptional value from your apps.

Optimize Applications Release Management

• Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

Embrace Business-Managed Applications

• Empower the business to implement their own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.

Build a Value Measurement Framework

• Focus product delivery on business value–driven outcomes.

Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

• Be careful what you ask for, because you will probably get it.

Application Portfolio Assessment: End User Feedback

• Develop data-driven insights to help you decide which applications to retire, upgrade, re-train on, or maintain to meet the demands of the business.

Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

• Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

Refine Your Estimation Practices With Top-Down Allocations

• Don’t let bad estimates ruin good work.

Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence

• Commit to achievable software releases by grounding realistic expectations

Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

• Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.

Optimize IT Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

• Deliver more projects by giving yourself the voice to say “no” or “not yet” to new projects.

Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports

• Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

• Focus product delivery on business value–driven outcomes.

Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

• Have the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

Implement a New IT Organizational Structure

• Reorganizations are inherently disruptive. Implement your new structure with minimal pain for staff while maintaining IT performance throughout the change.

Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

• Measure employee sentiment to drive IT performance

Set Meaningful Employee Performance Measures

• Set holistic measures to inspire employee performance.

Master Organizational Change Management Practices

• PMOs, if you don't know who is responsible for org change, it's you.

However, not all roadmaps address the correct audience and achieve those objectives. Care must be taken to align the view to the given audience.

Surveyed most important reason for using a product roadmap (Source: ProductPlan, 2018)

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

Product owners operate within this 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 accomplishing these missing pieces, product owners will encounter obstacles, resistance, or unexpected changes.

• Players – players have a high interest in the initiative and the influence to effect change over the initiative. Their support is critical, and a lack of support can cause significant impediment to the objectives.
• Mediators – mediators have a low interest but significant influence over the initiative. They can help to provide balance and objective opinions to issues that arise.
• Noisemakers – noisemakers have low influence but high interest. They tend to be very vocal and engaged, either positively or negatively, but have little ability to enact their wishes.
• Spectators – generally, spectators are apathetic and have little influence over or interest in the initiative.

1. Identify your stakeholder’s interest in and influence on your Agile implementation as high, medium, or low by rating the attributes below.
2. Map your results to the model below to determine each stakeholder’s category.
3. Record the results in the Build a Better Product Owner Workbook.

• Power: Ability of a stakeholder to effect change.
• Urgency: Degree of immediacy demanded.
• Legitimacy: Perceived validity of stakeholder’s claim.
• Volume: How loud their “voice” is or could become.
• Contribution: What they have that is of value to you.

How much are the stakeholder’s individual performance and goals directly tied to the success or failure of the product?

Info-Tech Insight

Each group of stakeholders draws attention and resources away from critical tasks. By properly identifying your stakeholder groups, the product owner can develop corresponding actions to manage stakeholders in each group. This can dramatically reduce wasted effort trying to satisfy Spectators and Noisemakers, while ensuring the needs of the Mediators and Players are met.

Each capability has three components needed for successful product ownership.

Definitions are on the following slides.

Define the skills and activities in each component that are directly related to your product and culture.

Market Analysis

• Unique solution: Identify the target users and unique value your product provides that is not currently being met.
• Market size: Define the size of your user base, segmentation, and potential growth.
• Competitive analysis: Determine alternative solutions, products, or threats that affect adoption, usage, and retention.

Business Alignment

• SWOT analysis: Complete a SWOT analysis for your end-to-end product lifecycle. Use Info-Tech’s Business SWOT Analysis Template.
• Enterprise alignment: Align product to enterprise goals, strategies, and constraints.
• Delivery strategy: Develop a delivery strategy to achieve value quickly and adapt to internal and external changes.

Product Roadmap

• Roadmap strategy: Determine the duration, detail, and structure of your roadmap to accurately communicate your vision.
• Value prioritization: Define criteria used to evaluate and sequence demand.
• Go to market strategy: Create organizational change management, communications, and a user implementation approach.

Info-Tech Insight

Data comes from many places and may still not tell the complete story.

“Customers are best heard through many ears.” (Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom)

Soft Skills

• Communication: Maintain consistent, concise, and appropriate communication using SMART guidelines (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely).
• Integrity: Stick to your values, principles, and decision criteria for the product to build and maintain trust with your users and teams.
• Influence: Manage stakeholders using influence and collaboration over contract negotiation.

Collaboration

• Stakeholder management: Build a communications strategy for each stakeholder group, tailored to individual stakeholders.
• Relationship management: Use every interaction point to strengthen relationships, build trust, and empower teams.
• Team development: Promote development through stretch goals and controlled risks to build team capabilities and performance.

Decision Making

• Prioritized criteria: Remove personal bias by basing decisions off data analysis and criteria.
• Continuous improvement: Balance new features with the need to ensure quality and create an environment of continuous improvement.
• Team empowerment/negotiation: Push decisions to teams closest to the problem and solution, using Delegation Poker to guide you.

Info-Tech Insight

Product owners cannot be just a proxy for stakeholder decisions. The product owner owns product decisions and management of all stakeholders.

“Everything walks the walk. Everything talks the talk.” (Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom)

Plan

• Product backlog: Follow a schedule for backlog intake, refinement, updates, and prioritization.
• Journey map: Create an end-user journey map to guide adoption and loyalty.
• Fit for purpose: Define expected value and intended use to ensure the product meets your end user’s needs.

Build

• Capacity management: Work with operations and delivery teams to ensure consistent and stable outcomes.
• Release strategy: Build learning, release, and critical milestones into a repeatable release plan.
• Compliance: Build policy compliance into delivery practices to ensure alignment and reduce avoidable risk (privacy, security).

Run

• Adoption: Focus attention on end-user adoption and proficiency to accelerate value and maximize retention.
• Support: Build operational support and business continuity into every team.
• Measure: Measure KPIs and validate expected value to ensure product alignment to goals and consistent product quality.

Info-Tech Insight

Product owners must actively manage the full lifecycle of the product.

“Pay fantastic attention to detail. Reward, recognize, celebrate.” (Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Usability and user satisfaction: Assess satisfaction through usage monitoring and end-user feedback.
• Value validation: Directly measure performance against defined value proposition, goals, and predicted ROI.
• Fit for purpose: Verify the product addresses the intended purpose better than other options.

Financial Management

• P&L: Manage each product as if it were its own business with profit and loss statements.
• Acquisition cost/market growth: Define the cost of acquiring a new consumer, onboarding internal users, and increasing product usage.
• User retention/market share: Verify product usage continues after adoption and solution reaches new user groups to increase value.

Business Model

• Defines value proposition: Dedicate your primary focus to understanding and defining the value your product will deliver.
• Market strategy and goals: Define your acquisition, adoption, and retention plan for users.
• Financial model: Build an end-to-end financial model and plan for the product and all related operational support.

Info-Tech Insight

Most organizations stop with on-time and on-budget. True financial alignment needs to define and manage the full lifecycle P&L.

“The competition is anyone the customer compares you with.” (Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom)

Vision

• Focusing solely on backlog refining (tactical only)
• Ignoring or failing to align product roadmap to enterprise goals
• Operational support and execution
• Basing decisions on opinion rather than market data
• Ignoring or missing internal and external threats to your product

Leadership

• Failing to include feedback from all teams who interact with your product
• Using a command-and-control approach
• Viewing product owner as only a delivery role
• Acting as a proxy for stakeholder decisions
• Avoiding tough strategic decisions in favor of easier tactical choices

Product Lifecycle Management

• Focusing on delivery and not the full product lifecycle
• Ignoring support, operations, and technical debt
• Failing to build knowledge management into the lifecycle
• Underestimating delivery capacity, capabilities, or commitment
• Assuming delivery stops at implementation

Value Realization

• Focusing exclusively on “on time/on budget” metrics
• Failing to measure a 360-degree end-user view of the product
• Skipping business plans and financial models
• Limiting financial management to project/change budgets
• Ignoring market analysis for growth, penetration, and threats

Emily Archer
Lead Business Analyst,
Enterprise Consulting, authentic digital agency

Emily Archer is a consultant currently working with Fortune 500 clients to ensure the delivery of successful projects, products, and processes. She helps increase the business value returned for organizations’ investments in designing and implementing enterprise content hubs and content operations, custom web applications, digital marketing, and e-commerce platforms.

David Berg
Founder & CTO
Strainprint Technologies Inc.

David Berg is a product commercialization expert that has spent the last 20 years of his career delivering product management and business development services across a broad range of industries. Early in his career, David worked with product management and engineering teams to build core network infrastructure products that secure and power the internet we benefit from today. David’s experience also includes working with clean technologies in the area of clean power generation, agritech, and Internet of Things infrastructure. Over the last five years, David has been focused on his latest venture, Strainprint Technologies, a data and analytics company focused on the medical cannabis industry. Strainprint has built the largest longitudinal medical cannabis dataset in the world with the goal to develop an understanding of treatment behavior, interactions, and chemical drivers to guide future product development.

Kathy Borneman
Digital Product Owner, SunTrust Bank

Kathy Borneman is a senior product owner who helps people enjoy their jobs again by engaging others in end-to-end decision making to deliver software and operational solutions that enhance the client experience and allow people to think and act strategically.

Charlie Campbell
Product Owner, Merchant e-Solutions

Charlie Campbell is an experienced problem solver with the ability to quickly dissect situations and recommend immediate actions to achieve resolution, liaise between technical and functional personnel to bridge the technology and communication gap, and work with diverse teams and resources to reach a common goal.

Yarrow Diamond
Sr. Director, Business Architecture
Financial Services

Yarrow Diamond is an experienced professional with expertise in enterprise strategy development, project portfolio management, and business process reengineering across financial services, healthcare and insurance, hospitality, and real estate environments. She has a master’s in Enterprise Architecture from Penn State University, LSSMBB, PMP, CSM, ITILv3.

Cari J. Faanes-Blakey, CBAP, PMI-PBA
Enterprise Business Systems Analyst,
Vertex, Inc.

Cari J. Faanes-Blakey has a history in software development and implementation as a Business Analyst and Project Manager for financial and taxation software vendors. Active in the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), Cari participated on the writing team for the BA Body of Knowledge 3.0 and the certification exam.

Kieran Gobey
Senior Consultant Professional Services
Blueprint Software Systems

Kieran Gobey is an IT professional with 24 years of experience, focused on business, technology, and systems analysis. He has split his career between external and internal customer-facing roles, and this has resulted in a true understanding of what is required to be a Professional Services Consultant. His problem-solving skills and ability to mentor others have resulted in successful software implementations.

Kieran’s specialties include deep system troubleshooting and analysis skills, facilitating communications to bring together participants effectively, mentoring, leadership, and organizational skills.

Rupert Kainzbauer
VP Product, Digital Wallets
Paysafe Group

Rupert Kainzbauer is an experienced senior leader with a passion for defining and delivering products that deliver real customer and commercial benefit. Together with a team of highly experienced and motivated product managers, he has successfully led highly complex, multi-stakeholder payments initiatives, from proposition development and solution design through to market delivery. Their domain experience is in building online payment products in high-risk and emerging markets, remittance, prepaid cards, and mobile applications.

Saeed Khan
Founder,
Transformation Labs

Saeed Khan has been working in high tech for 30 years in both Canada and the US and has held a number of leadership roles in Product Management over that time. He speaks regularly at conferences and has been writing publicly about technology product management since 2005.

Through Transformation Labs, Saeed helps companies accelerate product success by working with product teams to improve their skills, practices, and processes. He is a cofounder of ProductCamp Toronto and currently runs a Meetup group and global Slack community called Product Leaders, the only global community of senior-level product executives.

Hoi Kun Lo
Product Owner
Nielsen

Hoi Kun Lo is an experienced change agent who can be found actively participating within the IIBA and WITI groups in Tampa, FL, and a champion for Agile, architecture, diversity, and inclusion programs at Nielsen. She is currently a Product Owner in the Digital Strategy team within Nielsen Global Watch Technology.

Abhishek Mathur
Sr Director, Product Management
Kasisto, Inc.

Abhishek Mathur is a product management leader, an artificial intelligence practitioner, and an educator. He has led product management and engineering teams at Clarifai, IBM, and Kasisto to build a variety of artificial intelligence applications within the space of computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems. Abhishek enjoys having deep conversations about the future of technology and helping aspiring product managers enter and accelerate their careers.

Jeff Meister
Technology Advisor and Product Leader

Jeff Meister is a technology advisor and product leader. He has more than 20 years of experience building and operating software products and the teams that build them. He has built products across a wide range of industries and has built and led large engineering, design, and product organizations.

Jeff most recently served as Senior Director of Product Management at Avanade, where he built and led the product management practice. This involved hiring and leading product managers, defining product management processes, solution shaping and engagement execution, and evangelizing the discipline through pitches, presentations, and speaking engagements.

Jeff holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Electrical Engineering) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Waterloo, an MBA from INSEAD (Strategy), and certifications in product management, project management, and design thinking.

Vincent Mirabelli
Principal,
Global Project Synergy Group

With over 10 years of experience in both the private and public sectors, Vincent Mirabelli possesses an impressive track record of improving, informing, and transforming business strategy and operations through process improvement, design and re-engineering, and the application of quality to business analysis, project management, and process improvement standards.

Oz Nazili
VP, Product & Growth
TWG

Oz Nazili is a product leader with a decade of experience in both building products and product teams. Having spent time at funded startups and large enterprises, he thinks often about the most effective way to deliver value to users. His core areas of interest include Lean MVP development and data-driven product growth.

Mark Pearson
Principal IT Architect
First Data Corporation

Mark Pearson is an executive business leader grounded in the process, data, technology, and operations of software-driven business. He knows the enterprise software landscape and is skilled in product, technology, and operations design and delivery within information technology organizations, outsourcing firms, and software product companies.

Brenda Peshak
Product Owner,
Widget Industries, LLC

Brenda Peshak is skilled in business process, analytical skills, Microsoft Office Suite, communication, and customer relationship management (CRM). She is a strong product management professional with a Master’s focused in Business Leadership (MBL) from William Penn University.

Mike Starkey
Director of Engineering
W.W. Grainger

Mike Starkey is a Director of Engineering at W.W. Grainger, currently focusing on operating model development, digital architecture, and building enterprise software. Prior to joining W.W. Grainger, Mike held a variety of technology consulting roles throughout the system delivery lifecycle spanning multiple industries such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and utilities with Fortune 500 companies.

Anant Tailor
Cofounder & Head of Product
Dream Payments Corp.

Anant Tailor is a cofounder at Dream Payments where he currently serves as the COO and Head of Product, having responsibility for Product Strategy & Development, Client Delivery, Compliance, and Operations. He has 20+ years of experience building and operating organizations that deliver software products and solutions for consumers and businesses of varying sizes.

Prior to founding Dream Payments, Anant was the COO and Director of Client Services at DonRiver Inc, a technology strategy and software consultancy that he helped to build and scale into a global company with 100+ employees operating in seven countries.

Anant is a Professional Engineer with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University and a certificate in Product Strategy & Management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Angela Weller
Scrum Master, Businessolver

Angela Weller is an experienced Agile business analyst who collaborates with key stakeholders to attain their goals and contributes to the achievement of the company’s strategic objectives to ensure a competitive advantage. She excels when mediating or facilitating teams.