Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
Define products in your organization’s context and explore product families as a way to organize products at scale.
Identify an approach to group the inventory of products into one or more product families.
Confirm alignment between your products and product families via the product family roadmap and a shared definition of delivered value.
Agree on a delivery approach that best aligns with your product families.
Define your communication plan and transformation roadmap for transitioning to delivering products at the scale of your organization.
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Define products in your organization’s context and explore product families as a way to organize products at scale.
An understanding of the case for product practices
A concise definition of products and product families
1.1 Understand your organizational factors driving product-centric delivery.
1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory.
1.3 Determine your approach to scale product families.
Organizational drivers and goals for a product-centric delivery
Definition of product
Product scaling principles
Scaling approach and direction
Pilot list of products to scale
Identify a suitable approach to group the inventory of products into one or more product families.
A scaling approach for products that fits your organization
2.1 Define your product families.
Product family mapping
Enabling applications
Dependent applications
Product family canvas
Confirm alignment between your products and product families via the product family roadmap and a shared definition of delivered value.
Recognition of the product family roadmap and a shared definition of value as key concepts to maintain alignment between your products and product families
3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps.
3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication.
3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps.
3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment.
Current approach for communication of product family strategy
List of product family stakeholders and a prioritization plan for communication
Defined key pieces of a product family roadmap
An approach to confirming alignment between products and product families through a shared definition of business value
Agree on the delivery approach that best aligns with your product families.
An understanding of the team configuration and operating model required to deliver value through your product families
4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness.
4.2 Understand your delivery options.
4.3 Determine your operating model.
4.4 Identify how to fund product delivery.
4.5 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy.
4.6 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy.
4.7 Determine your next steps.
Assessment results on your organization’s delivery maturity
A preferred approach to structuring product delivery
Your preferred operating model for delivering product families
Understanding of your preferred approach for product family funding
Product family transformation roadmap
Your plan for communicating your roadmap
List of actionable next steps to start on your journey
Implement your communication plan and transformation roadmap for transitioning to delivering products at the scale of your organization.
New product family organization and supporting product delivery approach
5.1 Execute communication plan and product family changes.
5.2 Review the pilot family implementation and update the transformation roadmap.
5.3 Begin advisory calls for related blueprints.
Organizational communication of product families and product family roadmaps
Product family implementation and updated transformation roadmap
Support for product owners, backlog and roadmap management, and other topics
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
Info-Tech’s approach will guide you through:
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.
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.”
“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.”
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
“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.”
A proper definition of product recognizes three key facts:
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:
Business:
Technical:
Operations:
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?).
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”
Project |
Product |
|
---|---|---|
Fund projects |
Funding |
Fund products or teams |
Line of business sponsor |
Prioritization |
Product owner |
Makes specific changes to a product |
Product management |
Improve product maturity and support |
Assign people to work |
Work allocation |
Assign work to product teams |
Project manager manages |
Capacity management |
Team manages capacity |
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
Value Stream Alignment |
Enterprise Applications |
Shared Services |
Technical |
Organizational Alignment |
---|---|---|---|---|
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|
|
|
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Your product family roadmap
✓ Lays out a strategy for your product family.
✓ Is a statement of intent for your family of products.
✓ Communicates direction for the entire product family and product teams.
✓ Directly connects to the organization’s goals.
However, it is not:
x Representative of a hard commitment.
x A simple combination of your current product roadmaps.
Your product family roadmap and product roadmap tell different stories. The product family roadmap represents the overall connection of products to the enterprise strategy, while the product roadmap focuses on the fulfillment of the product’s vision.
Product
TACTICAL
A roadmap that is technical, committed, and detailed.
Product Family
STRATEGIC
A roadmap that is strategic, goal based, high level, and flexible.
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.
There is no such thing as a roadmap that never changes.
Your product family roadmap represents a broad statement of intent and high-level tactics to get closer to the organization’s goals.
All good product family roadmaps embrace change!
Your strategic intentions are subject to volatility, especially those planned further in the future. The more costs you incur in planning, the more you leave yourself exposed to inefficiency and waste if those plans change.
A good product family roadmap is intended to manage and communicate the inevitable changes as a result of market volatility and changes in strategy.
PRODUCT STRATEGY |
What are the artifacts? |
What are you saying? |
Defined at the family level? |
Defined at the product level? |
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vision |
I want to... |
✓ | ✓ | Strategic focus Delivery focus |
|
Goals |
To get there we need to... |
✓ | ✓ | ||
Roadmap |
To achieve our goals, we’ll deliver... |
✓ | ✓ | ||
Backlog |
The work will be done in this order... |
✓ | |||
Release Plan |
We will deliver in the following ways... |
✓ |
GROUP/CATEGORY: Groups are collections of artifacts. In a product family context, these are usually product family goals, value streams, or products.
ARTIFACT: An artifact is one of many kinds of tangible by-products produced during the delivery of products. For a product family, the artifacts represented are capabilities or value streams.
MILESTONE: Points in the timeline when established sets of artifacts are complete. This is a critical tool in the alignment of products in a given family.
TIME HORIZON: Separated periods within the projected timeline covered by the roadmap.
Audience |
Business/ IT Leaders |
Users/Customers |
Delivery Teams |
---|---|---|---|
Roadmap View |
Portfolio |
Product Family |
Technology |
Objectives |
To provide a snapshot of the portfolio and priority products |
To visualize and validate product strategy |
To coordinate broad technology and architecture decisions |
Artifacts |
Line items or sections of the roadmap are made up of individual products, and an artifact represents a disposition at its highest level. |
Artifacts are generally grouped by product teams and consist of strategic goals and the features that realize those goals. |
Artifacts are grouped by the teams who deliver that work and consist of technical capabilities that support the broader delivery of value for the product family. |
I want to... | I need to talk to... | Because they are focused on... | |||
ALIGN PRODUCT TEAMS | Get my delivery teams on the same page. | Architects | Products Owners | PRODUCTS | A product that delivers value against a common set of goals and objectives. |
SHOWCASE CHANGES | Inform users and customers of product strategy. | Bus. Process Owners | End Users | FUNCTIONALITY | A group of functionality that business customers see as a single unit. |
ARTICULATE RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS | Inform the business of product development requirements. | IT Management | Business Stakeholders | FUNDING | An initiative that those with the money see as a single budget. |
A decentralized IT operating model that embeds specific functions within LoBs/product teams and provides cross-organizational support for their initiatives.
A best-of-both-worlds model that balances the benefits of centralized and decentralized approaches to achieve both customer responsiveness and economies of scale.
A model that supports what is commonly referred to as a matrix organization, organizing by highly related service categories and introducing the role of the service owner.
A highly typical IT operating model that focuses on centralized strategic control and oversight in delivering cost-optimized and effective solutions.
A centralized IT operating model that lends well to more mature operating environments. Aimed at leveraging economies of scale in an end-to-end services delivery model.
Autonomy |
Flexibility |
Accountability |
---|---|---|
Fund what delivers value |
Allocate iteratively |
Measure and adjust |
Fund long-lived delivery of value through products (not projects). Give autonomy to the team to decide exactly what to build. |
Allocate to a pool based on higher-level business case. Provide funds in smaller amounts to different product teams and initiatives based on need. |
Product teams define metrics that contribute to given outcomes. Track progress and allocate more (or less) funds as appropriate. |
Changes to funding require changes to product and Agile practices to ensure product ownership and accountability.
CIO-CEO Alignment Diagnostic
Over 700 Info-Tech members have implemented the Balanced Value Measurement Framework.
“The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
– Warren Buffett
Understanding where you derive value is critical to building solid roadmaps.
Metrics and measurements are powerful tools to drive behavior change and decision making in your organization. However, metrics are highly prone to creating unexpected outcomes, so use them with great care. Use metrics judiciously to uncover insights but avoid gaming or ambivalent behavior, productivity loss, and unintended consequences.
INDUSTRY: Public Sector & Financial Services
SOURCE: Info-Tech Interviews
Two of the organizations we interviewed shared the challenges they experienced defining product families and the impact these challenges had on their digital transformations.
A major financial services organization (2,000+ people in IT) had employed a top-down line of business–focused approach and found itself caught in a vicious circle of moving applications between families to resolve cross-LoB dependencies.
A similarly sized public sector organization suffered from a similar challenge as grouping from the bottom up based on technology areas led to teams fragmented across multiple business units employing different applications built on similar technology foundations.
Results
Both organizations struggled for over a year to structure their product families. This materially delayed key aspects of their product-centric transformation, resulting in additional effort and expenditure delivering solutions piecemeal as opposed to as a part of a holistic product family. It took embracing a hybrid top-down and bottom-up approach and beginning with pilot product families to make progress on their transformation.
Cole Cioran
Practice Lead,
Applications Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
There is no such thing as a perfect product-family structure. There will always be trade-offs when you need to manage shifting demand from stakeholder groups spanning customers, business units, process owners, and technology owners.
Focusing on a single approach to structure your product families inevitably leads to decisions that are readily challenged or are brittle in the face of changing demand.
The key to accelerating a product-centric transformation is to build a hybrid model that embraces top-down and bottom-up perspectives to structure and evolve product families over time. Add a robust pilot to evaluate the structure and you have the key to unlocking the potential of product delivery in your organization.
1. Become a Product-Centric Organization |
2. Organize Products Into Product Families |
3. Ensure Alignment Between Products and Families |
4. Bridge the Gap Between Product Families and Delivery |
5. Build Your Transformation Roadmap and Communication Plan |
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Phase Steps |
1.1 Understand the organizational factors driving product-centric delivery 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory |
2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families 2.2 Define your product families |
3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps 3.4 Confirm goal and value alignment of products and their product families |
4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness 4.2 Understand your delivery options 4.3 Determine your operating model 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery |
5.1 Introduce your digital product family strategy 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy 5.3 Determine your next steps |
Phase Outcomes |
|
|
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|
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Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook
Use this supporting workbook to document interim results from a number of exercises that will contribute to your overall strategy.
Deliver Digital Products at Scale Readiness Assessment
Your strategy needs to encompass your approaches to delivery. Understand where you need to focus using this simple assessment.
Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook
Record the results from the exercises to help you define, detail, and deliver digital products at scale.
IT Benefits
|
Business Benefits
|
Member Outcome | Suggested Metric | Estimated Impact |
---|---|---|
Increase business application satisfaction |
Satisfaction with business applications (CIO Business Vision diagnostic) |
20% increase within one year after implementation |
Increase effectiveness of application portfolio management |
Effectiveness of application portfolio management (Management & Governance diagnostic) |
20% increase within one year after implementation |
Increase importance and effectiveness of application portfolio |
Importance and effectiveness to business ( Application Portfolio Assessment diagnostic) |
20% increase within one year after implementation |
Increase satisfaction of support of business operations |
Support to business (CIO Business Vision diagnostic. |
20% increase within one year after implementation |
Successfully deliver committed work (productivity) |
Number of successful deliveries; burndown |
20% increase within one year after implementation |
"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."
"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keeps us on track."
"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."
"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."
Phase 1: Become a Product-Centric Organization |
Phase 2: Organize Products Into Product Families |
Phase 3: Ensure Alignment Between Products and Families |
Phase 4: Bridge the Gap Between Product Families and Delivery |
---|---|---|---|
Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges. Call #2: Define products and product families in your context. Call #3: Understand the list of products in your context. |
Call #4: Define your scaling principles and goals. Call #5: Select a pilot and define your product families. |
Call #6: Understand the product family roadmap as a method to align products to families. Call #7: Define components of your product family roadmap and confirm alignment. |
Call #8: Assess your delivery readiness. Call #9: Discuss delivery, operating, and funding models relevant to delivering product families. Call #10: Wrap up. |
A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.
Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
Day 1
Become a Product-Centric Organization |
Day 2
Organize Products Into Product Families |
Day 3
Ensure Alignment Between Products and Families |
Day 4
Bridge the Gap Between Product Families and Delivery |
Advisory
Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite) |
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Activities |
1.1 Understand your organizational factors driving product-centric delivery. 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory. 2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families. |
2.2 Define your product families. |
3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps. 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication. 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps. 3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment. |
4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness. 4.2 Understand your delivery options. 4.3 Determine your operating model. 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery. 5.1 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy. 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy. 5.3 Determine your next steps. |
|
Key Deliverables |
|
|
|
|
|
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 |
---|---|---|---|---|
1.1 Understand the organizational factors driving product-centric delivery 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory | 2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families 2.2 Define your product families | 3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps 3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment | 4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness 4.2 Understand your delivery options 4.3 Determine your operating model 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery | 5.1 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy 5.3 Determine your next steps |
1.1.1 Understand your drivers for product-centric delivery
1.1.2 Identify the differences between project and product delivery
1.1.3 Define the goals for your product-centric organization
1.2.1 Define “product” in your context
1.2.2 Identify and establish a pilot list of products
Activities
1.1.1 Understand your drivers for product-centric delivery
1.1.2 Identify the differences between project and product delivery
1.1.3 Define the goals for your product-centric organization
Pain Points | Root Causes | Drivers |
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Note: This exercise is not about identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each style of delivery. This is to identify the variation between the two.
Project Delivery | Product Delivery |
---|---|
Point in time | What is changed |
Method of funding changes | Needs an owner |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Project | Product | |
---|---|---|
Fund projects | Funding | Fund products or teams |
Line of business sponsor | Prioritization | Product owner |
Makes specific changes to a product | Product management | Improves product maturity and support |
Assignment of people to work | Work allocation | Assignment of work to product teams |
Project manager manages | Capacity management | Team manages capacity |
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 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.
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.
Note: Your drivers may have already covered the goals. If so, review if you would like to change the drivers based on your renewed understanding of the differences between project and product delivery.
Pain Points | Root Causes | Drivers | Goals |
---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Activities
1.2.1 Define “product” in your context
1.2.2 Identify and establish a pilot list of products
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
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.”
“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.”
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
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:
Business:
Technical:
Operations
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?).
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”
It is easy to lose sight of what matters when we look at a product from a single point of view. Despite what The Agile Manifesto says, working software is not valuable without the knowledge and support that people need in order to adopt, use, and maintain it. If you build it, they will not come. Product leaders must consider the needs of all stakeholders when designing and building products.
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.
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.
“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:
There is more than one stakeholder group that derives value from the product or service.
For example:
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 |
---|---|---|---|---|
1.1 Understand the organizational factors driving product-centric delivery 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory | 2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families 2.2 Define your product families | 3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps 3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment | 4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness 4.2 Understand your delivery options 4.3 Determine your operating model 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery | 5.1 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy 5.3 Determine your next steps |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
2.1.1 Define your scaling principles and goals
2.1.2 Define your pilot product family areas and direction
2.2.1 Arrange your applications and services into product families
2.2.2 Define enabling and supporting applications
2.2.3 Build your product family canvas
This phase involves the following participants:
Activities
2.1.1 Define your scaling principles and goals
2.1.2 Define your pilot product family areas and direction
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
A product family is a logical and operational grouping of related products or services. The grouping provides a scaled hierarchy to translate goals, priorities, strategy, and constraints down the grouping while aligning value realization upwards.
A product family contains...
A product family can be grouped by...
“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
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.
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.
(More tactical product delivery focus)
(More strategic product family focus)
“Product owner” and “product manager” are terms that should be adapted to fit your culture and product hierarchy. These are not management relationships but rather a way to structure related products and services that touch the same end users. Use the terms that work best in your culture.
Download Build a Better Product Owner for role support.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Learn more about each pattern.
Discuss the pros and cons of each.
Select a pilot product area.
Select a pattern.
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.
Examples:
Market Alignment |
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Enterprise Applications |
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Shared Service |
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Business Architecture |
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Examples:
Technical Grouping |
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Functional/Capability Grouping |
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Shared Services Grouping |
|
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Activities
2.2.1 Arrange your applications and services into product families
2.2.2 Define enabling and supporting applications
2.2.3 Build your product family canvas
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
|
Alignment perspectives: | ||
Value Stream Align products based on the defined sources of value for a collection of products or services. For example: Wholesale channel for products that may also be sold directly to consumers, such as wireless network service. |
Users/Consumers Align products based on a common group of users or product consumers. For example: Consumer vs. small business vs. enterprise customers in banking, insurance, and healthcare. |
Common Domain Align products based on a common domain knowledge or skill set needed to deliver and support the products. For example: Applications in a shared service framework supporting other products. |
Value Stream Alignment | Enterprise Applications | Shared Services | Technical | Organizational Alignment |
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Top-Down |
Bottom-Up |
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We have a business architecture defined. (See Document Your Business Architecture and industry reference architectures for help.) |
Start with your business architecture |
Start with market segments |
We want to be more customer first or customer centric. |
Start with market segments |
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Our organization has rigid lines of business and organizational boundaries. |
Start with LoB structure |
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Most products are specific to a business unit or division. | Start with LoB structure | |
Products are aligned to people, not how we are operationally organized. |
Start with market or LoB structure |
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We are focusing on enterprise or enabling applications. |
1. Start with enterprise app and service team |
2. Align supporting apps |
We already have applications and services grouped into teams but want to evaluate if they are grouped in the best families. |
Validate using multiple patterns |
Validate using multiple patterns |
Our applications and services are shared across the enterprise or support multiple products, value streams, or shared capabilities. |
||
Our applications or services are domain, knowledge, or technology specific. |
Start by grouping inventory |
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We are starting from an application inventory. (See the APM Research Center for help.) |
Start by grouping inventory |
Example:
Your business architecture maps your value streams (value delivered to your customer or user personas) to the capabilities that deliver that value. A capability is the people, processes, and/or tools needed to deliver each value function.
Defining capabilities are specific to a value stream. Shared capabilities support multiple value streams. Enabling capabilities are core “keep the lights on” capabilities and enterprise functions needed to run your organization.
See Info-Tech’s industry coverage and reference architectures.
Download Document Your Business Architecture
Example:
Example:
Example:
For additional information about HRMS, please download Get the Most Out of Your HRMS.
Example:
Example:
Download Build a Better Product Owner for role support.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Product owners/managers
Provide target state to align child product and product family roadmaps.
Stakeholders
Communicate high-level concepts and key metrics with leadership teams and stakeholders.
Strategy teams
Use the canvas as a tool for brainstorming, scoping, and ideation.
Operations teams
Share background overview to align operational team with end-user value.
Impacted users
Refine communication strategy and support based on user impacts and value realization.
Download Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision.
Problem Statement: The problem or need the product family is addressing
Business Goals: List of business objectives or goals for the product
Personas/Customers/Users: List of groups who consume the product/service
Vision: Vision, unique value proposition, elevator pitch, or positioning statement
Child Product Families or Products: List of product families or products within this family
Stakeholders: List of key resources, stakeholders, and teams needed to support the product or service
Download Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 |
---|---|---|---|---|
1.1 Understand the organizational factors driving product-centric delivery 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory | 2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families 2.2 Define your product families | 3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps 3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment | 4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness 4.2 Understand your delivery options 4.3 Determine your operating model 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery | 5.1 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy 5.3 Determine your next steps |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
This phase involves the following participants:
Activities
3.1.1 Evaluate your current approach to product family communication
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Adapted from: Pichler," What Is Product Management?"
✓ Lays out a strategy for your product family.
✓ Is a statement of intent for your family of products.
✓ Communicates direction for the entire product family and product teams.
✓ Directly connects to the organization’s goals.
However, it is not:
x Representative of a hard commitment.
x A simple combination of your current product roadmaps.
x A technical implementation plan.
There is no such thing as a roadmap that never changes.
Your product family roadmap represents a broad statement of intent and high-level tactics to get closer to the organization’s goals.
All good product family roadmaps embrace change!
Your strategic intentions are subject to volatility, especially those planned further in the future. The more costs you incur in planning, the more you leave yourself exposed to inefficiency and waste if those plans change.
A good product family roadmap is intended to manage and communicate the inevitable changes as a result of market volatility and changes in strategy.
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.
Your enterprise vision represents your “north star” – where you want to go. It represents what you want to do.
Download Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision for support.
Audience | Business/ IT Leaders | Users/Customers | Delivery Teams |
---|---|---|---|
Roadmap View | Portfolio | Product Family | Technology |
Objectives | To provide a snapshot of the portfolio and priority products | To visualize and validate product strategy | To coordinate broad technology and architecture decisions |
Artifacts | Line items or sections of the roadmap are made up of individual products, and an artifact represents a disposition at its highest level. | Artifacts are generally grouped by product teams and consist of strategic goals and the features that realize those goals. | Artifacts are grouped by the teams who deliver that work and consist of technical capabilities that support the broader delivery of value for the product family. |
GROUP/CATEGORY: Groups are collections of artifacts. In a product family context, these are usually product family goals, value streams, or products.
ARTIFACT: An artifact is one of many kinds of tangible by-products produced during the delivery of products. For a product family, the artifacts represented are capabilities or value streams.
MILESTONE: Points in the timeline when established sets of artifacts are complete. This is a critical tool in the alignment of products in a given family.
TIME HORIZON: Separated periods within the projected timeline covered by the roadmap.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Activities
3.2.1 Visualize interrelationships among stakeholders to identify key influencers
3.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories
3.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders
Info-Tech Note
If you have done the stakeholder exercises in Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision or Build a Better Product Owner u don’t need to repeat the exercises from scratch.
You can bring the results forward and update them based on your prior work.
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Individuals who directly obtain value from usage of the product.
Represent individuals who provide the context, alignment, and constraints that influence or control what you will be able to accomplish.
Individuals both external and internal that fund the product initiative. Sometimes they are lumped in as stakeholders. However, motivations can be different.
For more information, see Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision.
Legend
Black arrows: indicate the direction of professional influence
Dashed green arrows: indicate bidirectional, informal influence relationships
Your stakeholder map defines the influence landscape your product family operates in. 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 substantial relationships with your stakeholders.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
There are four areas in the map, and the stakeholders within each area should be treated differently.
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.
Level of Influence |
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Level of Interest |
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How much are the stakeholder’s individual performance and goals directly tied to the success or failure of the product? |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Level of Support |
|||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Stakeholder Category |
Supporter |
Evangelist |
Neutral | Blocker | |
Player |
Critical |
High |
High |
Critical |
|
Mediator |
Medium |
Low |
Low |
Medium |
|
Noisemaker |
High |
Medium |
Medium |
High |
|
Spectator |
Low |
Irrelevant |
Irrelevant |
Low |
Consider the three dimensions for stakeholder prioritization: influence, interest, and support. Support can be determined by answering the following question: How likely is it that this stakeholder would recommend your product?
These parameters are used to prioritize which stakeholders are most important and should receive your focused attention.
Stakeholder | Category | Level of Support | Prioritization |
---|---|---|---|
CMO | Spectator | Neutral | Irrelevant |
CIO | Player | Supporter | Critical |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Type |
Quadrant |
Actions |
---|---|---|
Players |
High influence, high interest – actively engage |
Keep them updated on the progress of the project. Continuously involve Players in the process and maintain their engagement and interest by demonstrating their value to its success. |
Mediators |
High influence, low interest – keep satisfied |
They can be the game changers in groups of stakeholders. Turn them into supporters by gaining their confidence and trust and including them in important decision-making steps. In turn, they can help you influence other stakeholders. |
Noisemakers |
Low influence, high interest – keep informed |
Try to increase their influence (or decrease it if they are detractors) by providing them with key information, supporting them in meetings, and using Mediators to help them. |
Spectators |
Low influence, low interest – monitor |
They are followers. Keep them in the loop by providing clarity on objectives and status updates. |
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 Mediators and Players are met.
Activities
3.3.1 Define the communication objectives and audience of your product family roadmaps
3.3.2 Identify the level of detail that you want your product family roadmap artifacts to represent
If you are unfamiliar with product roadmaps, Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision contains more detailed exercises we recommend you review before focusing on product family roadmaps.
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
I want to... | I need to talk to... | Because they are focused on... | |||
ALIGN PRODUCT TEAMS | Get my delivery teams on the same page. | Architects | Products Owners | PRODUCTS | A product that delivers value against a common set of goals and objectives. |
SHOWCASE CHANGES | Inform users and customers of product strategy. | Bus. Process Owners | End Users | FUNCTIONALITY | A group of functionality that business customers see as a single unit. |
ARTICULATE RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS | Inform the business of product development requirements. | IT Management | Business Stakeholders | FUNDING | An initiative that those with the money see as a single budget. |
Roadmap | Audience | Statement |
---|---|---|
Internal Strategic Roadmap | Internal Stakeholders | This roadmap is designed to detail the strategy for delivery. It tends to use language that represents internal initiatives and names. |
Customer Strategic Roadmap | External Customers | This roadmap is designed to showcase and validate future strategic plans and internal teams to coordinate the development of features and enablers. |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Given the relationship between product and product family roadmaps, the product family roadmap needs to serve the time horizons of its respective products.
This translates into product family roadmaps with timelines that, at a minimum, cover the full scope of the respective product roadmaps.
Swimlane/Stream-Based – Understanding when groups of items intend to be delivered.
Now, Next, Later – Communicate an overall plan with rough intentions around delivery without specific date ranges.
Sunrise Roadmap – Articulate the journey toward a given target state across multiple streams.
Your product family roadmap and product roadmap tell different stories. The product family roadmap represents the overall connection of products to the enterprise strategy, while the product roadmap focuses on the fulfillment of the product’s vision.
30-60 minutes
Examples | Level of Hierarchy | Artifact Type |
---|---|---|
Roadmap 1 | Goals | Capability |
Roadmap 2 | ||
Roadmap 3 |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Activities
3.4.1 Validate business value alignment between products and their product families
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Product-to-family alignment can be validated in two different ways:
Confirm the perceived business value at a family level is aligned with what is being delivered at a product level.
Validate family roadmap attainment through progression toward the specified product goals.
For more detail on calculating business value, see Build a Value Measurement Framework.
Over 700 Info-Tech members have implemented the Balanced Value Measurement Framework.
“The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
– Warren Buffett
Understanding where you derive value is critical to building solid roadmaps.
Business value is the value of the business outcome the application produces and how effective the product is at producing that outcome. Dissecting value by the benefit type and the value source allows you to see the many ways in which a product or service brings value to your organization. Capture the value of your products in short, concise statements, like an elevator pitch.
Increase Revenue
Product or service functions that are specifically related to the impact on your organization’s ability to generate revenue.
Reduce Costs
Reduction of overhead. The ways in which your product limits the operational costs of business functions.
Enhance Services
Functions that enable business capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to perform its internal operations.
Reach Customers
Application functions that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce market information and insights.
Financial Benefits vs. Improved Capabilities
Inward vs. Outward Orientation
Download and complete Build a Value Measurement Framework for full support in focusing product delivery on business value–driven outcomes.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
Assign metrics to your business value sources
Business Value Category |
Source Examples |
Metric Examples |
---|---|---|
Profit Generation |
Revenue |
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) |
Data Monetization |
Average Revenue per User (ARPU) |
|
Cost Reduction |
Reduce Labor Costs |
Contract Labor Cost |
Reduce Overhead |
Effective Cost per Install (eCPI) |
|
Service Enablement |
Limit Failure Risk |
Mean Time to Mitigate Fixes |
Collaboration |
Completion Time Relative to Deadline |
|
Customer and Market Reach |
Customer Satisfaction |
Net Promoter Score |
Customer Trends |
Number of Customer Profiles |
The importance of measuring business value through metrics
The better an organization is at using business value metrics to evaluate IT’s performance, the more satisfied the organization is with IT’s performance as a business partner. In fact, those that say they’re effective at business value metrics have satisfaction scores that are 30% higher than those that believe significant improvements are necessary (Info-Tech’s IT diagnostics).
Assigning metrics to your prioritized values source will allow you to more accurately measure a product’s value to the organization and identify optimization opportunities. See Info-Tech’s Related Research: Value, Delivery Metrics, Estimation blueprint for more information.
As the saying goes “Be careful what you ask for, because you will probably get it.”
Metrics are powerful because they drive behavior.
It’s a cautionary tale that also offers a low-risk path through the complexities of metrics use.
For more information on the use (and abuse) of metrics, see Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively.
Metrics and measurements are powerful tools to drive behavior change and decision making in your organization. However, metrics are highly prone to creating unexpected outcomes, so use them with great care. Use metrics judiciously to uncover insights but avoid gaming or ambivalent behavior, productivity loss, and unintended consequences.
Build good practices in your selection and use of metrics:
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 |
---|---|---|---|---|
1.1 Understand the organizational factors driving product-centric delivery 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory | 2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families 2.2 Define your product families | 3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps 3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment | 4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness 4.2 Understand your delivery options 4.3 Determine your operating model 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery | 5.1 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy 5.3 Determine your next steps |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
4.1.1 Assess your organization’s readiness to deliver digital product families
4.2.1 Consider pros and cons for each delivery model relative to how you wish to deliver
4.3.1 Understand the relationships between product management, delivery teams, and stakeholders
4.4.1 Discuss traditional vs. product-centric funding methods
This phase involves the following participants:
Realigning your delivery pipeline and org design takes significant effort and time. Although we won’t solve these questions here, it’s important to identify factors in your current or future models that improve value delivery.
Activities
4.1.1 Assess your organization’s readiness to deliver digital product families
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Just like product owners, product family owners are needed to develop long-term product value, strategy, and delivery. Projects can still be used as the source of funding and change management; however, the product family owner must manage product releases and operational support. The focus of this section will be on aligning product families to one or more releases.
Output
Participants
Download the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Readiness Assessment.
PRODUCT STRATEGY | What are the artifacts? | What are you saying? | Defined at the family level? | Defined at the product level? | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vision | I want to... | ✓ | ✓ | Strategic focus Delivery focus | |
Goals | To get there we need to... | ✓ | ✓ | ||
Roadmap | To achieve our goals, we’ll deliver... | ✓ | ✓ | ||
Backlog | The work will be done in this order... | ✓ | |||
Release Plan | We will deliver in the following ways... | ✓ |
Activities
4.2.1 Consider pros and cons for each delivery model relative to how you wish to deliver
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
The goal of your product delivery strategy is to establish streamlined, enforceable, and standardized product management and delivery capabilities that follow industry best practices. You will need to be strategic in how and where you implement your changes because this will set the stage for future adoption. Strategically select the most appropriate products, roles, and areas of your organization to implement your new or enhanced capabilities and establish a foundation for scaling.
Successful product delivery requires people who are knowledgeable about the products they manage and have a broad perspective of the entire delivery process, from intake to delivery, and of the product portfolio. The right people also have influence with other teams and stakeholders who are directly or indirectly impacted by product decisions. Involve team members who have expertise in the development, maintenance, and management of your selected products and stakeholders who can facilitate and promote change.
The primary goal of any product delivery team is to improve the delivery of value for customers and the business based on your product definition and each product’s demand. Each organization will have different priorities and constraints, so your team structure may take on a combination of patterns or may take on one pattern and then transform into another.
Delivery Team Structure Patterns |
How Are Resources and Work Allocated? |
|
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Functional Roles |
Teams are divided by functional responsibilities (e.g. developers, testers, business analysts, operations, help desk) and arranged according to their placement in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). |
Completed work is handed off from team to team sequentially as outlined in the organization’s SDLC. |
Shared Service and Resource Pools |
Teams are created by pulling the necessary resources from pools (e.g. developers, testers, business analysts, operations, help desk). |
Resources are pulled whenever the work requires specific skills or pushed to areas where product demand is high. |
Product or System |
Teams are dedicated to the development, support, and management of specific products or systems. |
Work is directly sent to the teams who are directly managing the product or directly supporting the requester. |
Skills and Competencies |
Teams are grouped based on skills and competencies related to technology (e.g. Java, mobile, web) or familiarity with business capabilities (e.g. HR, finance). |
Work is directly sent to the teams who have the IT and business skills and competencies to complete the work. |
Functional Roles | Shared Service and Resource Pools | Product or System | Skills and Competencies | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pros |
✓ Product knowledge is maintained |
✓ Supports full utilization of resources |
✓ Standing teams enable continuous improvement |
✓ Standing teams enable continuous improvement |
Cons |
x Creates barriers to collaboration |
x Product knowledge can be lost as resources move |
x Cross-functional skills make staffing a challenge |
x Resource contention when team supports multiple solutions |
Considerations |
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Use Case |
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|
Functional Roles | Teams are divided by functional responsibilities (e.g. developers, testers, business analysts, operations, help desk) and arranged according to their placement in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). |
---|---|
Shared Service and Resource Pools | Teams are created by pulling the necessary resources from pools (e.g. developers, testers, business analysts, operations, help desk). |
Product or System | Teams are dedicated to the development, support, and management of specific products or systems. |
Skills and Competencies | Teams are grouped based on skills and competencies related to technology (e.g. Java, mobile, web) or familiarity with business capabilities (e.g. HR, finance). |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Activities
4.3.1 Understand the relationships between product management, delivery teams, and stakeholders
This step involves the following participants:
Value Stream Alignment |
Enterprise Applications |
Shared Services |
Technical |
Organizational Alignment |
---|---|---|---|---|
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An operating model is an abstract visualization, used like an architect’s blueprint, that depicts how structures and resources are aligned and integrated to deliver on the organization’s strategy. It ensures consistency of all elements in the organizational structure through a clear and coherent blueprint before embarking on detailed organizational design
The visual should highlight which capabilities are critical to attaining strategic goals and clearly show the flow of work so that key stakeholders can understand where inputs flow in and outputs flow out of the IT organization.
For more information, see Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure.
A decentralized IT operating model that embeds specific functions within LoBs/product teams and provides cross-organizational support for their initiatives.
A best-of-both-worlds model that balances the benefits of centralized and decentralized approaches to achieve both customer responsiveness and economies of scale.
A model that supports what is commonly referred to as a matrix organization, organizing by highly related service categories and introducing the role of the service owner.
A highly typical IT operating model that focuses on centralized strategic control and oversight in delivering cost-optimized and effective solutions.
A centralized IT operating model that lends well to more mature operating environments. Aimed at leveraging economies of scale in an end-to-end services delivery model.
There are many different operating models. LoB/Product Aligned and Hybrid Functional align themselves most closely with how products and product families are typically delivered.
BENEFITS |
DRAWBACKS |
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For more information, see Redesign your IT Organizational Structure.
BENEFITS | DRAWBACKS |
---|---|
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For more information, see Redesign your IT Organizational Structure.
BENEFITS | DRAWBACKS |
---|---|
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For more information, see Redesign your IT Organizational Structure.
BENEFITS | DRAWBACKS |
---|---|
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For more information, see Redesign your IT Organizational Structure.
BENEFITS | DRAWBACKS |
---|---|
|
|
For more information, see Redesign your IT Organizational Structure.
Value Stream Alignment | Enterprise Applications | Shared Services | Technical | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Plan-Build-Run: | Pro: Supports established and stable families. Con: Command-and-control nature inhibits Agile DevOps and business agility. | Pro: Supports established and stable families. Con: Command-and-control nature inhibits Agile DevOps and business agility. | Pro: Can be used to align high-level families. Con: Lacks flexibility at the product level to address shifting priorities in product demand. | Pro: Supports a factory model. Con: Lacks flexibility at the product level to address shifting priorities in product demand. |
Centralized Model 2: | Pro: Supports established and stable families. Con: Command-and-control nature inhibits Agile DevOps and business agility. | Pro: Supports established and stable families. Con: Command-and-control nature inhibits Agile DevOps and business agility. | Pro: Recommended for aligning high-level service families based on user needs. Con: Reduces product empowerment, prioritizing demand. Slow. | Pro: Supports factory models. Con: Reduces product empowerment, prioritizing demand. Slow. |
Decentralized Model: Functionally Aligned | Pro: Aligns product families to value streams, capabilities, and organizational structure. Con: Reduces shared solutions and may create duplicate apps and services. | Pro: Enterprise apps treated as distinct LoB groups. Con: Reduces shared solutions and may create duplicate apps and services. | Pro: Complements value stream alignment by consolidating shared apps and services. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Fits within other groupings where technical expertise is needed. Con: Creates redundancy between localized and shared technical teams. |
Hybrid Model: Aligned | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Creates redundancy between localized and shared technical teams. |
Hybrid Model: Product-Aligned Operating Model | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Requires additional effort to differentiate local vs. shared solutions. | Pro: Supports multiple patterns of product grouping. Con: Creates redundancy between localized and shared technical teams. |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Output
Participants
Activities
4.4.1 Discuss traditional vs. product-centric funding methods
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
These models require increasing accuracy throughout the project lifecycle to manage actuals vs. estimates.
"Most IT funding depends on one-time expenditures or capital-funding mechanisms that are based on building-construction funding models predicated on a life expectancy of 20 years or more. Such models don’t provide the stability or flexibility needed for modern IT investments." – EDUCAUSE
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.
Autonomy | Flexibility | Accountability |
---|---|---|
Fund what delivers value | Allocate iteratively | Measure and adjust |
Fund long-lived delivery of value through products (not projects). Give autonomy to the team to decide exactly what to build. | Allocate to a pool based on higher-level business case. Provide funds in smaller amounts to different product teams and initiatives based on need. | Product teams define metrics that contribute to given outcomes. Track progress and allocate more (or less) funds as appropriate. |
Info-Tech Insight
Changes to funding require changes to product and Agile practices to ensure product ownership and accountability.
A flexible funding pool akin to venture capital models is maintained to support innovative ideas and fund proofs of concept for product and process improvements.
Proofs of concept (POCs) are run by standing innovation teams or a reserve of resources not committed to existing products, projects, or services.
Every product line has funding for all changes and ongoing operations and support.
Teams are funded continuously so that they can learn and improve their practices as much as possible.
TRADITIONAL PROJECTS WITH WATERFALL DELIVERY |
TRADITIONAL PROJECTS WITH AGILE DELIVERY |
PRODUCTS WITH AGILE PROJECT DELIVERY |
PRODUCTS WITH AGILE DELIVERY |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
WHEN IS THE BUDGET TRACKED? |
Budget tracked by major phases |
Budget tracked by sprint and project |
Budget tracked by sprint and project |
Budget tracked by sprint and release |
HOW ARE CHANGES HANDLED? |
All change is by exception |
Scope change is routine, budget change is by exception |
Scope change is routine, budget change is by exception |
Budget change is expected on roadmap cadence |
WHEN ARE BENEFITS REALIZED? |
Benefits realization after project completion |
Benefits realization is ongoing throughout the life of the project |
Benefits realization is ongoing throughout the life of the product |
Benefits realization is ongoing throughout life of the product |
WHO “DRIVES”? |
Project Manager
|
Product Owner
|
Product Manager
|
Product Manager |
As you evolve your approach to product delivery, you will be decoupling the expected benefits, forecast, and budget. Managing them independently will improve your ability to adapt to change and drive the right outcomes!
Adapted from: LookFar
While the exact balance point between development or implementation costs varies from application to application, over 80% of the cost is accrued after go-live.
The challenge has always been the myth that operations are only bug fixes, upgrades, and other operational expenditures. Research shows that most post-release work on developed solutions is the development of new features and changes to support material changes in the business. While projects could bundle some of these changes into capital expenditure, much of the business-as-usual work that goes on leaves capital expenses on the table because the work is lumped together as maintenance-related OpEx.
From “How to Stop Leaving Software CapEx on the Table With Agile and DevOps”
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 |
---|---|---|---|---|
1.1 Understand the organizational factors driving product-centric delivery 1.2 Establish your organization’s product inventory | 2.1 Determine your approach to scale product families 2.2 Define your product families | 3.1 Leverage product family roadmaps 3.2 Use stakeholder management to improve roadmap communication 3.3 Configure your product family roadmaps 3.4 Confirm product family to product alignment | 4.1 Assess your organization’s delivery readiness 4.2 Understand your delivery options 4.3 Determine your operating model 4.4 Identify how to fund product family delivery | 5.1 Learn how to introduce your digital product family strategy 5.2 Communicate changes on updates to your strategy 5.3 Determine your next steps |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
5.1.1 Introduce your digital product family strategy
5.2.1 Define your communication cadence for your strategy updates
5.2.2 Define your messaging for each stakeholder
5.3.1 How do we get started?
This phase involves the following participants:
Activities
5.1.1 Introduce your digital product family strategy
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Software delivery teams and stakeholders traditionally make plans, strategies, and releases within their silos and tailor their decisions based on their own priorities. Interactions are typically limited to hand-offs (such as feature requests) and routing of issues and defects back up the delivery pipeline. These silos likely came about through well-intentioned training, mandates, and processes, but they do not sufficiently support today’s need to rapidly release and change platforms.
Siloed departments often have poor visibility into the activities of other silos, and they may not be aware of the ramifications their decisions have on teams and stakeholders outside of their silo.
In some cases, the only way to achieve greater visibility and communication for all roles across a platform’s lifecycle is implementing an overarching role or team.
“The majority of our candid conversations with practitioners and project management offices indicate that the platform ownership role is poorly defined and poorly executed.”
– Barry Cousins
Practice Lead, Applications – Project & Portfolio Management
Info-Tech Research Group
When building your communication strategy, revisit the work you completed in phase 3 developing your:
Type | Quadrant | Actions |
---|---|---|
Players | High influence, high interest – actively engage | Keep them updated on the progress of the project. Continuously involve Players in the process and maintain their engagement and interest by demonstrating their value to its success. |
Mediators | High influence, low interest – keep satisfied | They can be the game changers in groups of stakeholders. Turn them into supporters by gaining their confidence and trust and including them in important decision-making steps. In turn, they can help you influence other stakeholders. |
Noisemakers | Low influence, high interest – keep informed | Try to increase their influence (or decrease it if they are detractors) by providing them with key information, supporting them in meetings, and using Mediators to help them. |
Spectators | Low influence, low interest – monitor | They are followers. Keep them in the loop by providing clarity on objectives and status updates. |
This exercise is intended to help you lay out the framing of your strategy and the justification for the effort. A lot of these items can be pulled directly from the product canvas you created in phase 2. This is intended to be a single slide to frame your upcoming discussions.
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Why do we need product families?
What is in our way?
Our first step will be...
Activities
5.2.1 Define your communication cadence for your strategy updates
5.2.2 Define your messaging for each stakeholder
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Remember the role of different artifacts when it comes to your strategy. The canvas contributes to the What, and the roadmap addresses the How. Any updates to the strategy are articulated and communicated through your roadmap.
EXAMPLE:
Roadmap Name |
Audience/Stakeholders |
Communication Cadence |
---|---|---|
External Customer Roadmap |
Customers and External Users |
Quarterly (Website) |
Product Delivery Roadmap |
Development Teams, Infrastructure, Architects |
Monthly (By Email) |
Technology Roadmap |
Development Teams, Infrastructure, Architects |
Biweekly (Website) |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message, i.e. a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state and makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.
The change message should:
Five elements of communicating change
Source: Cornelius & Associates
Why are we here?
Speak to what matters to them
Sell the improvement
Show real value
Discuss potential fears
Ask for their support
Be gracious
It’s one thing to communicate the strategy, it’s another thing to send the right message to your stakeholders. Some of this will depend on the kind of news given, but the majority of this is dependent on the stakeholder and the cadence of communication.
EXAMPLE:
Roadmap Name | Audience/ Stakeholder | Communication Cadence | Messaging |
---|---|---|---|
External Customer Roadmap | Customers and External Users | Quarterly (Website) |
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Activities
5.3.1 How do we get started?
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Learning Milestones |
Sprint Zero (AKA Project-before-the-project) |
---|---|
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 |
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.
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?
Source: “Tips for Agile product roadmaps & product roadmap examples,” Scrum.org, 2017
Source: “Tips for Agile product roadmaps & product roadmap examples,” Scrum.org, 2017
Output
Participants
Record the results in the Digital Product Family Strategy Playbook.
Record the results in the Deliver Digital Products at Scale Workbook.
The journey to become a product-centric organization is not short or easy. Like with any improvement or innovation, teams need to continue to evolve and mature with changes in their operations, teams, tools, and user needs.You’ve taken a big step completing your product family alignment. This provides a backbone for aligning all aspects of your organization to your enterprise goals and strategy while empowering product teams to find solutions closer to the problem. Continue to refine your model and operations to improve value realization and your product delivery pipelines to embrace business agility. Organizations that are most responsive to change will continue to outperform command-and-control leadership.
Contact your account representative for more information.
1-888-670-8889
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.
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’s of Applied Science (Electrical Engineering) and a Bachelor’s 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.
Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
Build Your Agile Acceleration Roadmap
Implement Agile Practices That Work
Implement DevOps Practices That Work
Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT
Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline
Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence
Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile
Application Portfolio Management for Small Enterprises
Streamline Application Maintenance
Build an Application Rationalization Framework
Review Your Application Strategy
Streamline Application Management
Optimize Applications Release Management
Embrace Business-Managed Applications
Build a Value Measurement Framework
Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively
Application Portfolio Assessment: End User Feedback
Create a Holistic IT Dashboard
Refine Your Estimation Practices With Top-Down Allocations
Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence
Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case
Optimize Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization
Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports
Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure
Build a Strategic Workforce Plan
Implement a New Organizational Structure
Improve Employee Engagement to Drive IT Performance
Set Meaningful Employee Performance Measures
Master Organizational Change Management Practices
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