Mature and Scale Product Ownership

Mature and Scale Product Ownership

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

Executive Brief

Analyst Perspective

Empower product owners throughout your organization.

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

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

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

Hans Eckman

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

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

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

Info-Tech’s Approach

Product owners make the final decision

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

The Info-Tech difference

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

Insight summary

There is no single correct approach to product ownership

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

Phase 1 insight

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

Phase 2 insight

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

Phase 3 insight

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

Product and service ownership share the same foundation

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

Map product owner roles to your existing job titles

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

Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements

Projects within products

Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a product-based or project-based shop, the same basic principles should apply.

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

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

Product and services owners share the same foundation and capabilities

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

Product = Service

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

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

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

Recognize the product owner perspectives

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

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

Product portfolio

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

Project portfolio manager

Product family

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

Product family manager

Product

Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

Product owner

Info-Tech Insight

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

Align enterprise value through product families

Understand special circumstances

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

Value stream alignment

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

Enterprise applications

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

Shared Services

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

Technical

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

Organizational alignment

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

Map sources of demand and influencers

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

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

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

Info-Tech Insight

The product owner owns the direction of the product.

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

Product delivery realizes value for your product family

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

Product family owners are more strategic

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

Connecting your product family roadmaps to product roadmaps

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

Develop a product owner stakeholder strategy

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

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

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

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

Create a stakeholder network map to product roadmaps and prioritization

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

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

Being successful at Agile is more than about just doing Agile

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

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

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

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

Why focus on core skills?

They are the foundation to achieve business outcomes

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

Focus on these real Agile skills

Agile skills

• Accountability
• Collaboration
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Communication
• Empathy
• Facilitation
• Functional decomposition
• Initiative
• Process discipline
• Resilience

Product capabilities deliver value

As a product owner, you are responsible for managing these facets through your capabilities and activities.

Info-Tech Best Practice

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 owners must consider the needs of all stakeholders when designing and building products.

Recognize product owner knowledge gaps

Pulse survey of product owners

Info-Tech Insight

1. Less than 15% of respondents identified analytics or financial management as a key component of product ownership.
2. Assess your product owner’s capabilities and understanding to develop a maturity plan.

Source: Pulse Survey (N=18)

Implement the Info-Tech product owner capability model

Unfortunately, most product owners operate with incomplete knowledge of the skills and capabilities needed to perform the role. Common gaps include focusing only on product backlogs, acting as a proxy for product decisions, and ignoring the need for key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics in both planning and value realization.

Vision

• Market Analysis
• Business Alignment
• Product Roadmap

Leadership

• Soft Skills
• Collaboration
• Decision Making

Product Lifecycle Management

• Plan
• Build
• Run

Value Realization

• KPIs
• Financial Management
• Business Model

Product owner capabilities provide support

Your vision informs and aligns what goals and capabilities are needed to fulfill your product or product family vision and align with enterprise goals and priorities. Each item on your roadmap should have corresponding KPIs or OKRs to know how far you moved the value needle. Value realization measures how well you met your target, as well as the impacts on your business value canvas and cost model.

Your leadership skills improve collaborations and decisions when working with your stakeholders and product delivery teams. This builds trust and improves continued improvements to the entire product lifecycle. A product owner’s focus should always be on finding ways to improve value delivery.

Product owner capabilities provide support

Develop product owner capabilities

Avoid common capability gaps

Vision

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

Leadership

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

Product lifecycle management

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

Value realization

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

Your product vision is your North Star

It's ok to dream a little!

Adapted from: Crossing the Chasm

Info-Tech Best Practice

A product vision shouldn’t be so far out that it doesn’t feel real or so short-term that it gets bogged down in minutiae and implementation details. Finding the right balance will take some trial and error and will be different for each organization.

Leverage the product canvas to state and inform your product vision

Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

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

Use a balanced value to establish a common definition of goals and value

Value drivers are strategic priorities aligned to our enterprise strategy and translated through our product families. Each product and change has an impact on the value driver helping us reach our enterprise goals.

Info-Tech Insight

Your value drivers and impact helps estimate the expected value of roadmap items, prioritize roadmap and backlog items, and identify KPIs and OKRs to measure value realization and actual impact.

Use CLAIM to guide your journey

Value is best created by self-managing teams who deliver in frequent, short increments supported by leaders who coach them through challenges.

Product-centric delivery and Agile are a radical change in how people work and think. Structured, facilitated learning is required throughout the transformation to help leaders and practitioners make the shift.

Product management, Agile, and DevOps have inspired SDLC tools that have become a key part of delivery practices and work management.

Self-organizing teams that cross business, delivery, and operations are essential to gain the full benefits of product-centric delivery.

Successful implementations require the disciplined use of metrics that support developing better teams

Communicate reasons for changes and how they will be implemented

Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message; that is, a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state, and that makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.

The organizational change message should:

• Explain why the change is needed.
• Summarize what will stay the same.
• Highlight what will be left behind.
• Emphasize what is being changed.
• Explain how the change will be implemented.
• Address how change will affect various roles in the organization.
• Discuss the staff’s role in making the change successful.

Info-Tech’s methodology for mature and scale product ownership

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

Key deliverable

Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook

Capture and organize the outcomes of the activities in the workbook.

Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook

The workbook helps organize and communicate the outcomes of each activity.

Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment

Determine your level of mastery of real Agile skills and product owner capabilities.

Blueprint benefits

IT benefits

• Competent product owner who can support teams operating in any delivery methodology.
• Representative viewpoint and input from the technical and operational product owner perspectives.
• Products aligned to business needs and committed work are achievable.
• Single point of contact with a business representative.
• Acceptance of product owner role outside the Scrum teams.

Business benefits

• Better alignment to enterprise goals, vision, and outcomes.
• Improved coordination with stakeholders.
• Quantifiable value realization tied to vision.
• Product decisions made at the right time and with the right input.
• Product owner who has the appropriate business, operations, and technical knowledge.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Align product owner metrics to product delivery and value realization.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"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."

Guided Implementation

"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 keep us on track."

Workshop

"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."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project"

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

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 and 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Related Info-Tech Research

Product delivery

Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

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

Deliver Digital Products at Scale

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

Build Your Agile Acceleration Roadmap

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

Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

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

Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT

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

Build Your BizDevOps Playbook

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

Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline

Shift security left to get into DevSecOps.

Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

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

Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

Execute a disciplined approach to rolling out Agile methods in the organization.

Related Info-Tech Research

Application portfolio management

APM Research Center

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

Application Portfolio Management Foundations

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

Streamline Application Maintenance

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

Streamline Application Management

Move beyond maintenance to ensuring exceptional value from your apps.

Build an Application Department Strategy

Delivering value starts with embracing what your department can do.

Embrace Business-Managed Applications

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

Optimize Applications Release Management

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

Related Info-Tech Research

Value, delivery metrics, estimation

Build a Value Measurement Framework

Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

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

Application Portfolio Assessment: End User Feedback

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

Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

Refine Your Estimation Practices With Top-Down Allocations

Don’t let bad estimates ruin good work.

Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence

Commit to achievable software releases by grounding realistic expectations.

Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.

Optimize Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

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

Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports

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

Related Info-Tech Research

Organizational design and performance

Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

Build a Strategic Workforce Plan

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

Implement a New Organizational Structure

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

Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

Don’t just measure engagement, act on it.

Set Meaningful Employee Performance Measures

Set holistic measures to inspire employee performance.

Phase 1

Establish the Foundation for Product Ownership

Mature and Scale Product Ownership

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

This phase involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Delivery managers
• Business analysts

Step 1.1

Establish an environment for product owner success

Activities

1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

Establish the foundation for product ownership

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Delivery managers
• Business analysts

Outcomes of this step

• Enablers and blockers
• Role definitions

Empower product owners as the true owners of their product

Product ownership requires decision-making authority and accountability for the value realization from those decisions. POs are more than a proxy for stakeholders, aggregators for changes, and the communication of someone else’s priorities.

“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 Technical Product Managers”

Info-Tech Best Practice

Implement Info-Tech’s Product Owner Capability Model to help empower and hold product owners accountable for the maturity and success of their product. The product owner must understand how their product fits into the organization’s mission and strategy in order to align to enterprise value.

Product and service owners share the same foundation and capabilities

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

Product = Service

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

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

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

Define product ownership to match your culture and customers

Characteristics of a discrete product:

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

What does not need a product owner?

• Individual features
• Transactions
• Unstructured data
• One-time solutions
• Non-repeatable processes
• Solutions that have no users or consumers
• People or teams

Info-Tech Insight

• Products are long-term endeavors that don’t end after the project finishes.
• Products mature and improve their ability to deliver value.
• Products have a discrete backlog of changes to improve the product itself, separate from operational requests fulfilled by the product or service.

Need help defining your products or services? Download our blueprint Deliver Digital Products at Scale.

Connect roadmaps to value realization with KPIs

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Info-Tech Insight

Every roadmap item should have an expected realized value once it is implemented. The associate KPIs or OKRs determine if our goal was met. Any gap in value feedback back into the roadmap and backlog refinement.

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements

Projects withing products

Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a product-based or project-based shop, the same basic principles should apply.

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

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

Recognize common barriers to product management

The transition to product ownership is a series of behavioral and cultural changes supported by processes and governance. It takes time and consistency to be successful.

• Command and control structures
• Lack of ownership and accountability
• High instability in the market, demand, or organization
• Lack of dedicated teams align to delivery, service, or product areas
• Culture of one-off projects
• Lack of identified and engaged stakeholders
• Lack of customer exposure and knowledge

Agile’s four core values

“…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

Source: “The Agile Manifesto”

We value...

Exercise 1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

1 hour

1. Identify and mitigate blockers of product management in your organization.
2. What enablers will support strong product owners?
3. What blockers will make the transition to product management harder?
4. For each blocker, also define at least one mitigating step.

Output

• Enablers and blockers

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Align enterprise value through product families

Effective product delivery requires thinking about more than just a single product

Good application and product management begins with strengthening good practices for a single or small set of applications, products, and services.

Product portfolio

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

Project portfolio manager

Product family

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

Product family manager

Product

Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

Product owner

Info-Tech Insight

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

Exercise 1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

1-2 hour

1. Identify the roles in which product management activities will be owned.
2. Define a common set of role names and describe the role.
3. Map the level of accountability for each role: Product or Product Family
4. Product owner perspectives will be defined in the next step.

Output

• Role definitions

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Use CLAIM to guide your journey

Value is best created by self-managing teams who deliver in frequent, short increments supported by leaders who coach them through challenges.

Product-centric delivery and Agile are a radical change in how people work and think. Structured, facilitated learning is required throughout the transformation to help leaders and practitioners make the shift.

Product management, Agile, and DevOps have inspired SDLC tools that have become a key part of delivery practices and work management.

Self-organizing teams that cross business, delivery, and operations are essential to gain the full benefits of product-centric delivery.

Successful implementations require the disciplined use of metrics that support developing better teams

Exercise 1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

1 hour

1. Open and complete the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment in your Playbook or the provided Excel tool.
2. Discuss high and low scores for each area to reach a consensus.
3. Record your results in your Playbook.

Output

• Assessment of product management readiness based on Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G model.

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment.

Communicate reasons for changes and how they will be implemented

Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message; that is, a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state, and that makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.

The organizational change message should:

Step 1.2

Establish your product ownership model

Activities

1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

Establish the foundation for product ownership

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Delivery managers
• Business analysts

Outcomes of this step

• Product owner perspective mapping
• Product owner RACI

Recognize the product owner perspectives

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

Info-Tech Best Practice

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

Identify and align to product owner perspectives to ensure product success

Product owner perspectives

1. Each product owner perspective provides important feedback, demand, and support for the product.
2. Where a perspective is represented by a distinct role, the perspective is managed with that product owner.
3. If separate roles don’t exist, the product owner must evaluate their work using two or three perspectives.
4. The ultimate success of a product, and therefore product owner, is meeting the end-user value of the business product owner, tool support of the technical product owner, and manual processing support of the operations product owner.

Line of business (LOB) product owners

LOB product owners focus on the products and services consumed by the organization’s external consumers and users. The role centers on the market needs, competitive landscape, and operational support to deliver products and services.

Business perspective

• Alignment to enterprise strategy and priorities
• Growth: market penetration and/or revenue
• Perception of product value
• Quality, stability, and predictability
• Improvement and innovation
• P&L
• Market threats and opportunities
• Speed to market
• Service alignment
• Meet or exceed individual goals

Relationship to Operations

• Customer satisfaction
• Speed of delivery and manual processing
• Continuity

Relationship to Technical

• Enabler
• Analysis and insight
• Lower operating and support costs

Technical product owners

Technical product owners are responsible for the IT systems, tools, platforms, and services that support business operations. Often they are identified as application or platform managers.

Technical perspective

• Application, application suite, or group of applications
• Core platforms and tools
• Infrastructure and networking
• Third-party technology services
• Enable business operations
• Direct-to-customer product or service
• Highly interconnected
• Need for continuous improvement
• End-of-life management
• Internal value proposition and users

Relationship to Business

• Direct consumers
• End users
• Source of funding

Relationship to Operations

• End users
• Process enablement or automation
• Support, continuity, and manual intervention

Operations (service) product owners

Operational product owners focus on the people, processes, and tools needed for manual processing and decisions when automation is not cost-effective. Operational product owners are typically called service owners due to the nature of their work.

Operational perspective

• Business enablement
• Continuity
• Problem, incident, issue resolution
• Process efficiency
• Throughput
• Error/defect avoidance
• Decision enablement
• Waste reduction
• Limit time in process
• Disaster recovery

Relationship to Business

• Revenue enablement
• Manual intervention and processing
• End-user satisfaction

Relationship to Technical

• Process enabler
• Performance enhancement
• Threat of automation

Exercise 1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

1 hour

1. Identify which product owner perspective represents your primary focus.
2. Determine where the other perspectives need to be part of your product roadmap or if they are managed by other product owners.

Output

• Identification of primary product owner perspective.

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Realign differences between project managers and product owners

Manage and communicate key milestones

Successful product owners understand and define the key milestones in their product delivery lifecycles. These need to be managed along with the product backlog and roadmap.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Product ownership isn’t just about managing the product backlog and development cycles. Teams need to manage key milestones such as learning milestones, test releases, product releases, phase gates, and other organizational checkpoints.

Define who manages each key milestone

Key milestones must be proactively managed. If a project manager is not available, those responsibilities need to be managed by the product owner or Scrum Master. Start with responsibility mapping to decide which role will be responsible.

*Scrum Master, Delivery Manager, Team Lead

Exercise 1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

60 minutes

1. Review your product and project delivery methodologies to identify key milestones (including approvals, gates, reviews, compliance checks, etc.). List each milestone on a flip chart or whiteboard.
2. For each milestone, define who is accountable for the completion.
3. For each milestone, define who is responsible for executing the milestone activity. (Who does the work that allows the milestone to be completed?)
4. Review any responsibility and accountability gaps and identify opportunities to better support and execute your operating model.
5. If you previously completed Deliver Digital Products at Scale , review and update your RACI in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

Output

• Product owner RACI

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Phase 2

Align Product Owners to Products

Mature and Scale Product Ownership

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

This phase involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Delivery managers
• Business analysts

Step 2.1

Assign product owners to products

Activities

2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

Align product owners to products

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Delivery managers
• Business analysts

Outcomes of this step

• Product resource assignment

Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

Using the role definitions, you created in Exercise 1.1.2, determine which roles correspond to which levels of your product families.

Product portfolio

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

Project portfolio manager

Product family

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

Product family manager

Product

Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

Product owner

Info-Tech Insight

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

Assign resources throughout your product families

Info-Tech Insight

• Start by assigning resources to each product or product family box.
• A product owner can be responsible for more than one product.
• Ownership of more than one product does not mean they share the same backlog.
• For help organizing your product families, please download Deliver Digital Products at Scale.

Understand special circumstances

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

Value stream alignment

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

Enterprise applications

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

Shared Services

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

Technical

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

Organizational alignment

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

Map the source of demand to each product

With enterprise applications and shared services, your demand comes from other product and service owners rather than end customers in a value stream.

Enterprise applications

• Primary demand comes from the operational teams and service groups using the platform.
• Each group typically has processes and tools aligned to a module or portion of the overall platform.
• Product owners determine end-user needs to assist with process improvement and automation.
• Product family managers help align roadmap goals and capabilities across the modules and tools to ensure consistency and the alignment of changes.

Shared services

• Primary demand for shared services comes from other product owners and service managers whose solution or application is dependent on the shared service platform.
• Families are grouped by related themes (e.g. workflow tools) to increase reusability, standard enterprise solutions, reduced redundancy, and consistent processes across multiple teams.
• Product owners manage the individual applications or services within a family.

Pattern: Enterprise applications

A division or group delivers enabling capabilities and the team’s operational alignment maps directly to the modules/components of an enterprise application and other applications that support the specific business function.

Example:

• Human resources is one corporate function. Within HR, however, there are subfunctions that operate independently.
• Each operational team is supported by one or more applications or modules within a primary HR system.
• Even though the teams work independently, the information they manage is shared with, or ties into processes used by other teams. Coordination of efforts helps provide a higher level of service and consistency.

For additional information about HRMS, please download Get the Most Out of Your HRMS.

Assigning owners to enterprise applications

Align your enterprise application owners to your operating teams that use the enterprise applications. Effectively, your service managers will align with your platform module owners to provide integrated awareness and planning.

Pattern: Shared services

Grouping by service type, knowledge area, or technology allows for specialization while families align service delivery to shared business capabilities.

Example:

• Recommended for governance, risk, and compliance; infrastructure; security; end-user support; and shared platforms (workflow, collaboration, imaging/record retention). Direct hierarchies do not necessarily exist within the shared service family.
• Service groupings are common for service owners (also known as support managers, operations managers, etc.).
• End-user ticketing comes through a common request system, is routed to the team responsible for triage, and then is routed to a team for resolution.
• Collaboration tools and workflow tools are enablers of other applications, and product families might support multiple apps or platforms delivering that shared capability.

Assigning owners to shared services

Assign owners by service type, knowledge area, or technology to provide alignment of shared business capabilities and common solutions.

Map sources of demand and influencers

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

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

Exercise 2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

1-4 hours

1. Use the product families you completed in Deliver Digital Products at Scale to determine which products and product families need a resource assigned. Where the same resource fills more than one role, they are the product owner or manager for each independently.
2. Product families that are being managed as products (one backlog for multiple products) should have one owner until the family is split into separate products later.
3. For each product and family, define the following:
   • Who is the owner (role or person)?
   • Is ownership clearly defined?
   • Are there other stakeholders who make decisions for the product?
4. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook on the Product Owner Mapping worksheet.

Output

• Product owner and manager resource alignment.

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Step 2.2

Manage stakeholder influence

Activities

2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

Align product owners to products

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Delivery managers
• Business analysts

Outcomes of this step

• Stakeholder management strategy

Develop a product owner stakeholder strategy

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

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

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

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

Create a stakeholder network map to product roadmaps and prioritization

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

Info-Tech Insight

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

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

Exercise 2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

1 hour

1. List direct stakeholders for your product.
2. Determine the stakeholders of your stakeholders and consider adding each of them to the stakeholder list.
3. Assess who has either formal or informal influence over your stakeholders; add these influencers to your stakeholder list.
4. Construct a diagram linking stakeholders and their influencers together.
   • Use black arrows to indicate the direction of professional influence.
   • Use dashed green arrows to indicate informal bidirectional influence relationships.
5. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

Output

• Relationships among stakeholders and influencers

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Categorize your stakeholders with a prioritization map

A stakeholder prioritization map helps product owners categorize their stakeholders by their level of influence and ownership in the product and/or teams.

There are four areas on the map, and the stakeholders within each area should be treated differently.

• 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 impediments to the objectives.
• 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 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 are generally apathetic and have little influence over or interest in the initiative.

Exercise 2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

1 hour

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

Output

• Categorization of stakeholders and influencers

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Prioritize your stakeholders

There may be too many stakeholders to be able to manage them all. Focus your attention on the stakeholders that matter most.

Consider the three dimensions of stakeholder prioritization: influence, interest, and support. Support can be determined by rating the following question: How likely is it that your stakeholder would recommend your product? These parameters are used to prioritize which stakeholders are most important and should receive your focused attention. The table to the right indicates how stakeholders are ranked.

Exercise 2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

1 hour

1. Identify the level of support of each stakeholder by answering the following question: How likely is it that your stakeholder would endorse your product?
2. Prioritize your stakeholders using the prioritization scheme on the previous slide.
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

Output

• Stakeholder and influencer prioritization

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Development team leads
• Portfolio managers
• Business analysts

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

Define strategies for engaging stakeholders by type

Info-Tech Insight

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

Phase 3

Mature Product Owner Capabilities

Mature and Scale Product Ownership

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

3.2.1 Assess your vision capability proficiency

3.2.2 Assess your leadership capability proficiency

3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

This phase involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers

Step 3.1

Assess your Agile product owner readiness

Activities

3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

Mature product owner capabilities

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers

Outcomes of this step

• Real Agile skill proficiency assessment

Why focus on core skills?

They are the foundation to achieve business outcomes

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

Being successful at Agile is more than about just doing Agile

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

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

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

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

Focus on these real Agile skills

Agile skills

• Accountability
• Collaboration
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Communication
• Empathy
• Facilitation
• Functional decomposition
• Initiative
• Process discipline
• Resilience

Info-Tech research shows these are the real Agile skills to get started with

Accountability

An accountable person:

• Takes ownership of their own decisions and actions and is responsible for the quality of results.
• Recognizes personal accountabilities to others, including customers.
• Works well autonomously.
• Ensures that the mutual expectations between themselves and others are clearly defined.
• Takes the appropriate actions to ensure that obligations are met in a timely manner.
• As a leader, takes responsibility for those being led.

Accountability drives high performance in teams and organizations

• The performance level of teams depends heavily on accountability and who demonstrates it:
  • In weak teams, there is no accountability.
  • In mediocre teams, supervisors demonstrate accountability.
  • In high-performance teams, peers manage most performance problems through joint accountability. (Grenny, 2014)
• According to Bain & Company, accountability is the third most important attribute of high-performing companies. Some of the other key attributes include honest, performance-focused, collaborative, and innovative. (Mankins, 2013)

All components of the employee empowerment driver have a strong, positive correlation with engagement.

Source: McLean & Company Engagement Database, 2018; N=71,794

Accountability

Your Score: ____

Collaboration as a skill

The principles and values of Agile revolve around collaboration.

• Works well with others on specialized and cross-functional teams.
• Can self-organize while part of a team.
• Respects the commitments that others make.
• Identifies and articulates dependencies.
• Values diverse perspectives and works with others to achieve the best output possible.
• Effective at working toward individual, team, department, and organizational goals.

Collaboration

The Agile Manifesto has three principles that focus on collaboration:

1. The business and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
2. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.
3. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Effective collaboration supports Agile behaviors, including embracing change and the ability to work iteratively.

Collaboration

Your Score: ____

Comfort with ambiguity

Ability to handle ambiguity is a key factor in Agile success.

• Implies the ability to maintain a level of effectiveness when all information is not present.
• Able to confidently act when presented with a problem without all information present.
• Risk and uncertainty can comfortably be handled.
• As a result, can easily adapt and embrace change.
• People comfortable with ambiguity demonstrate effective problem-solving skills.

Relative importance of traits found in Agile teams

1. Handles ambiguity
2. Agreeable
3. Conscientious

Comfort with ambiguity

Your Score: ____

Communication

Even though many organizations recognize its importance, communication is one of the root causes of project failure.

56%

56% of the resources spent on a project are at risk due to ineffective communications.

PMI, 2013.

29%

In 29% of projects started in the past 12 months, poor communication was identified as being one of the primary causes of failure.

PMI, 2013.

Why are communication skills important to the Agile team?

It’s not about the volume, it’s about the method.

• Effectively and appropriately interacts with others to build relationships and share ideas and information.
• Uses tact and diplomacy to navigate difficult situations.
• Relays key messages by creating a compelling story, targeted toward specific audiences.

Adapted From: Agile Modeling

Communication

Your Score:____

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another in order to better serve your team and your stakeholders. There are three kinds:

Cognitive

Thought, understanding, intellect

• Knowing how someone else feels and what they might be thinking.
• Contributes to more effective communication.

Emotional

Feelings, physical sensation

• You physically feel the emotions of the other person.
• Helps build emotional connections with others.

Compassionate

Intellect, emotion with action

• Along with understanding, you take action to help.

How is empathy an Agile skill?

Empathy enables you to serve your team, your customers, and your organization

Serving the team

• Primary types: Emotional and compassionate empathy.
• The team is accountable for delivery.
• By being able to empathize with the person you are talking to, complex issues can be addressed.
• A lack of empathy leads to a lack of collaboration and being able to go forward on a common path.

Serving your customers and stakeholders

• Primary type: Cognitive empathy.
• Agile enables the delivery of the right value at the right time to your stakeholders
• Translating your stakeholders' needs requires an understanding of who they are as people. This is done through observations, interviews and conversations.
• Leveraging empathy maps and user-story writing is an effective tool.

Empathy

Your Score: ____

Facilitation

It’s not just your manager’s problem.

“Facilitation is the skill of moderating discussions within a group in order to enable all participants to effectively articulate their views on a topic under discussion, and to ensure that participants in the discussion are able to recognize and appreciate the differing points of view that are articulated.” (IIBA, 2015)

• Drives action through influence, often without authority.
• Leads and impacts others' thinking, decisions, or behavior through inclusive practices and relationship building.
• Encourages others to self-organize and hold themselves accountable.
• Identifies blockers and constructively removes barriers to progress.

Facilitation

Your Score: ____

Functional decomposition

It’s not just a process, it’s a skill.

“Functional decomposition helps manage complexity and reduce uncertainty by breaking down processes, systems, functional areas, or deliverables into their simpler constituent parts and allowing each part to be analyzed independently."

(IIBA, 2015)

Being able to break down requirements into constituent consumable items (example: epics and user stories).

Use artifact mapping to improve functional decomposition

In our research, we refer to these items as epics, capabilities, features, and user stories. How you develop your guiding principles and structure your backlog should be based on the terminology and artifact types commonly used in your organization.

Functional Decomposition

Your Score: ____

Initiative and self-organization

A team that takes initiative can self-organize to solve critical problems.

• "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." (Agile Manifesto)
• In a nutshell, the initiative represents the ability to anticipate challenges and act on opportunities that lead to better business outcomes.
• Anticipates challenges and acts on opportunities that lead to better business outcomes.
• Thinks critically and is motivated to use both specialist expertise and general knowledge.
• Driven by the delivery of business value and better business outcomes.
• Empowers others to act and is empowered and self-motivated.

Initiative and self-organization

Your Score: ____

Process discipline

A common misconception is that Agile means no process and no discipline. Effective Agile teams require more adherence to the right processes to create a culture of self-improvement.

• Refers to the focus of following the right steps for a given activity at the right time to achieve the right outcomes.
• Focus on following the right steps for a given activity at the right time to achieve desired outcomes.

Process discipline

Your Score: ____

Resilience

If your team hits the wall, don’t let the wall hit them back.

• Resilience is critical for an effective Agile transformation. A team that demonstrates resilience always exhibits:
• Evolution over transformation – There is a recognition that changes happen over time.
• Intensity and productivity – A race is not won by the ones who are the fastest, but by the ones who are the most consistent. Regardless of what comes up, the team can push through.
• That organizational resistance is futile – Given that it is working on the right objectives, the team needs to demonstrate a consistency of approach and intensity regardless of what may stand in its way.
• Refers to the behaviors, thoughts, and actions that allow a person to recover from stress and adversity.

How resilience aligns with Agile

A team is not “living the principles” without resilience.

1. Purpose

   Aligns with: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” The vision or goals may not be clear in certain circumstances and can be difficult to relate to a single work item. Being able to intrinsically source and harness a sense of purpose becomes more important, especially as a self-organizing team.

2. Perseverance

   Aligns with: “Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.” Perseverance enables teams to continuously deliver at a steady pace, addressing impediments or setbacks and continuing to move forward.

3. Composure

   Aligns with: “Agile processes promote sustainable development,” and “At regular intervals, the team reflects ... and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
   When difficult situations arise, composure allows us to understand perspectives, empathize with customers, accept late changes, and sustain a steady pace.

4. Self-Reliance

   Aligns with: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Knowing oneself, recognizing strengths, and drawing on past successes, can be a powerful aid in creating high-performing Agile teams

5. Authenticity

   Aligns with: “At regular intervals, the team reflects … and adjusts its behavior accordingly,” and “Build projects around motivated individuals.”
   When difficult situations arise, authenticity is crucial. “For example, being able to openly disclose areas outside of your strengths in sprint planning or being able to contribute constructively toward self-organization.”

Adapted from: Why Innovation, 2019.

Resilience

Your Score: ____

Exercise 1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

1 hour

1. Review each real Agile skill and determine your current proficiency.
2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

Output

• Agile skills assessment results.

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

Step 3.2

Mature product owner capabilities

Activities

3.2.1 Assess your vision capability proficiency

3.2.2 Assess your leadership capability proficiency

3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

Mature product owner capabilities

This step involves the following participants:

• Product owners
• Product managers

Outcomes of this step

• Info-Tech product owner capability model proficiency assessment

Product capabilities deliver value

As a product owner, you are responsible for managing these facets through your capabilities and activities.

Info-Tech Best Practice

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 owners must consider the needs of all stakeholders when designing and building products.

Recognize product owner knowledge gaps

Pulse survey of product owners

Info-Tech Insight

1. Less than 15% of respondents identified analytics or financial management as a key component of product ownership.
2. Assess your product owner’s capabilities and understanding to develop a maturity plan.

Source: Pulse Survey (N=18)

Implement the Info-Tech product owner capability model

Unfortunately, most product owners operate with incomplete knowledge of the skills and capabilities needed to perform the role. Common gaps include focusing only on product backlogs, acting as a proxy for product decisions, and ignoring the need for key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics in both planning and value realization.

Vision

• Market Analysis
• Business Alignment
• Product Roadmap

Leadership

• Soft Skills
• Collaboration
• Decision Making

Product Lifecycle Management

• Plan
• Build
• Run

Value Realization

• KPIs
• Financial Management
• Business Model

Product owner capabilities provide support

Your vision informs and aligns what goals and capabilities are needed to fulfill your product or product family vision and align with enterprise goals and priorities. Each item on your roadmap should have corresponding KPIs or OKRs to know how far you moved the value needle. Value realization measures how well you met your target, as well as the impacts on your business value canvas and cost model.

Your leadership skills improve collaborations and decisions when working with your stakeholders and product delivery teams. This builds trust and improves continued improvements to the entire product lifecycle. A product owner’s focus should always be on finding ways to improve value delivery.

Product owner capabilities provide support

Develop product owner capabilities

Avoid common capability gaps

Vision

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

Leadership

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

Product lifecycle management

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

Value realization

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

Capabilities: Vision

Market Analysis

• Customer Empathy: Identify the target users and unique value your product provides that is not currently being met. Define the size of your user base, segmentation, and potential growth.
• Customer Journey: Define the future path and capabilities your users will respond to.
• Competitive analysis: Complete a SWOT analysis for your end-to-end product lifecycle. Use Info-Tech’s Business SWOT Analysis Template.

Business Alignment

• Enterprise alignment: Align to enterprise and product family goals, strategies, and constraints.
• Delivery and release strategy: Develop a delivery strategy to achieve value quickly and adapt to internal and external changes. Value delivery is constrained by your delivery pipeline.
• OCM and go-to-market strategy: Create organizational change management, communications, and a user implementation approach to improve adoption and satisfaction from changes.

Product Roadmap

• Roadmap strategy: Determine the duration, detail, and structure of your roadmap to accurately communicate your vision.
• Value prioritization: Define criteria used to evaluate and sequence demand items.
• Release and capacity planning: Build your roadmap with realistic goals and milestones based on your delivery pipeline and dependencies.

“Customers are best heard through many ears.”

– Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

Info-Tech Insight

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

Build your product strategy playbook

Complete Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision to define your Vision, Goals, Roadmap approach, and Backlog quality filters.

Digital Product Strategy Supporting Workbook

Supporting workbook that captures the interim results from a number of exercises that will contribute to your overall digital product vision.

Product Backlog Item Prioritization Tool

An optional tool to help you capture your product backlog and prioritize based on your given criteria

Product Roadmap Tool

An optional tool to help you build out and visualize your first roadmap.

Your Digital Product Vision Details Strategy

Record the results from the exercises to help you define, detail, and make real your digital product vision.

Your product vision is your North Star

It's ok to dream a little!

Adapted from: Geoffrey Moore, 2014.

Info-Tech Best Practice

A product vision shouldn’t be so far out that it doesn’t feel real or so short-term that it gets bogged down in minutiae and implementation details. Finding the right balance will take some trial and error and will be different for each organization.

Use product roadmaps to guide delivery

In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we showed how the product roadmap is key to value realization. As a product owner, the product roadmap is your communicated path to align teams and changes to your defined goals, while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Info-Tech Best Practice Product delivery requires a comprehensive set of business and technical competencies to effectively roadmap, plan, deliver, support, and validate your product portfolio. Product delivery is a “multi-faceted, complex discipline that can be difficult to grasp and hard to master.” It will take time to learn and adopt methods and become a competent product manager or owner (“What Is Product Management?”, Pichler Consulting Limited).

Match your roadmap and backlog to the needs of the product

Ultimately, you want products to be able to respond faster to changes and deliver value sooner. The level of detail in the roadmap and backlog is a tool to help the product owner plan for change. The duration of your product roadmap is all directly related to the tier of product owner in the product family.

Product delivery realizes value for your product family

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

Use artifact mapping to improve functional decomposition

In our research, we refer to these items as epics, capabilities, features, and user stories. How you develop your guiding principles and structure your backlog should be based on the terminology and artifact types commonly used in your organization.

Manage and communicate key milestones

Successful product owners understand and define the key milestones in their product delivery lifecycles. These need to be managed along with the product backlog and roadmap.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Product ownership isn’t just about managing the product backlog and development cycles! Teams need to manage key milestones such as learning milestones, test releases, product releases, phase gates, and other organizational checkpoints!

Milestones

• Points in the timeline when the established set of artifacts is complete (feature-based), or checking status at a particular point in time (time-based).
• Typically assigned a date and used to show the progress of development.
Plays an important role when sequencing different types of artifacts.

Release dates

• Releases mark the actual delivery of a set of artifacts packaged together in a new version of the product.
• Release dates, firm or not, allow stakeholders to anticipate when this is coming.

Leverage the product canvas to state and inform your product vision

Capability: Vision

Your Score: ____

Exercise 3.2.1 Assess your Vision capability proficiency

1 hour

1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

Output

• Product owner capability assessment

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

Capabilities: Leadership

Soft Skills

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

Collaboration

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

Decision Making

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

“Everything walks the walk. Everything talks the talk.”

– Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

Info-Tech Insight

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

Capability: Leadership

Your Score: ____

Exercise 3.2.2 Assess your Leadership capability proficiency

1 hour

1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

Output

• Product owner capability assessment

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

Capability: Product lifecycle management

Plan

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

Build

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

Run

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

“Pay fantastic attention to detail. Reward, recognize, celebrate.”

– Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

Info-Tech Insight

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

Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

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

A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

Detailed Appropriately: PBIs are broken down and refined, as necessary.

Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.

Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.

Prioritized: The PBI’s value and priority are determined at each tier.

(Perforce, 2018)

Distinguish your specific goals for refining in the product backlog vs. planning for a sprint itself

Often backlog refinement is used interchangeably or considered a part of sprint planning. The reality is they are very similar, as the required participants and objectives are the same; however, there are some key differences.

Use quality filters to promote high value items into the delivery pipeline

Basic scrum process

The scrum process coordinates multiple stakeholders to deliver on business priorities.

Capability: Product lifecycle management

Your Score: ____

Exercise 3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

1 hour

1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

Output

• Product owner capability assessment

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

Capabilities: Value realization

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

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

Financial management

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

Business model

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

“The competition is anyone the customer compares you with.”

– Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

Info-Tech Insight

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

Use a balanced value to establish a common definition of goals and value

Value drivers are strategic priorities aligned to our enterprise strategy and translated through our product families. Each product and change has an impact on the value driver helping us reach our enterprise goals.

Info-Tech Insight

Your value drivers and impact helps estimate the expected value of roadmap items, prioritize roadmap and backlog items, and identify KPIs and OKRs to measure value realization and actual impact.

Include balanced value as one criteria to guide better decisions

Your balanced value is just one of many criteria needed to align your product goals and sequence roadmap items. Feasibility, delivery pipeline capacity, shared services, and other factors may impact the prioritization of backlog items.

Determine your value drivers

Competent organizations know that value cannot always be represented by revenue or reduced expenses. However, it is not always apparent how to envision the full spectrum of sources of value. Dissecting value by benefit type and the value source’s orientation allows you to see the many ways in which a product or service brings value to the organization.

Business value matrix

Financial benefits vs. improved capabilities

Financial benefits refer to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics and is often quite tangible.

Human benefits refer to how a product or service can deliver value through a user’s experience.

Inward vs. outward orientation

Inward refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.

Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

Exercise 3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

1 hour

1. Brainstorm the different types of business value that you produce on the sticky notes (one item per page). Draw from examples of products in your portfolio.
2. Identify the most important value items for your organization (two to three per quadrant).
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook.

Output

• Product owner capability assessment

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook.

My business value sources

Capability: Value realization

Your Score: ____

Exercise 3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

1 hour

1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

Output

• Product owner capability assessment

Participants

• Product owners
• Product managers

Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

Summary of Accomplishment

Problem solved.

Product ownership can be one of the most difficult challenges facing delivery and operations teams. By focusing on operational grouping and alignment of goals, organizations can improve their value realization at all levels in the organization.

The foundation for delivering and enhancing products and services is rooted in the same capability model. Traditionally, product owners have focused on only a subset of skills and capabilities needed to properly manage and grow their products. The product owner capability model is a useful tool to ensure optimal performance from product owners and assess the right level of detail for each product within the product families.

Congratulations. You’ve completed a significant step toward higher-value products and services.

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as apart of an Info-Tech workshop

Contact your account representative for more information

workshops@infotech.com
1-888-670-8889

Additional Support

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as apart of an Info-Tech workshop

Contact your account representative for more information
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

Assess your skills and capabilities against the real Agile skills inventory

2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

Build a stakeholder management strategy.

Research Contributors and Experts

Emily Archer

Lead Business Analyst,
Enterprise Consulting, authentic digital agency

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

David Berg

Founder & CTO
Strainprint Technologies Inc.

David Berg is a product commercialization expert who has spent the last 20 years 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 a goal to develop an understanding of treatment behavior, interactions, and chemical drivers to guide future product development.

Research Contributors and Experts

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.

Research Contributors and Experts

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.

Research Contributors and Experts

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. 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.

Research Contributors and Experts

Saeed Khan

Founder,
Transformation Labs

Saeed Khan has been working in high tech for 30 years in Canada and the US and has held several leadership roles in Product Management in 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.

Research Contributors and Experts

Abhishek Mathur

Sr Director, Product Management
Kasisto, Inc.

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

Jeff Meister

Technology Advisor and Product Leader

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

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

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

Research Contributors and Experts

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.

Research Contributors and Experts

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 and 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 degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University and a certificate in Product Strategy & Management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Research Contributors and Experts

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.

Related Info-Tech Research

Product Delivery

Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

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

Deliver Digital Products at Scale

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

Build Your Agile Acceleration Roadmap

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

Implement Agile Practices That Work

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

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

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

Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT

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

Build Your BizDevOps Playbook

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

Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline

Shift security left to get into DevSecOps.

Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

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

Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

Execute a disciplined approach to rolling out Agile methods in the organization.

Related Info-Tech Research

Application Portfolio Management

APM Research Center

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

Application Portfolio Management Foundations

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

Streamline Application Maintenance

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

Streamline Application Management

Move beyond maintenance to ensuring exceptional value from your apps.

Build an Application Department Strategy

Delivering value starts with embracing what your department can do.

Embrace Business-Managed Applications

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

Optimize Applications Release Management

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

Related Info-Tech Research

Value, Delivery Metrics, Estimation

Build a Value Measurement Framework

Focus product delivery on business value–driven outcomes.

Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

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

Application Portfolio Assessment: End User Feedback

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

Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

Refine Your Estimation Practices With Top-Down Allocations

Don’t let bad estimates ruin good work.

Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence

Commit to achievable software releases by grounding realistic expectations.

Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.

Optimize Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

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

Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports

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

Related Info-Tech Research

Organizational Design and Performance

Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

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

Implement a New Organizational Structure

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

Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

Don’t just measure engagement, act on it

Set Meaningful Employee Performance Measures

Set holistic measures to inspire employee performance.

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Leffingwell, Dean. “SAFe 4.0.” Scaled Agile Inc, 2017. Accessed Feb. 2019.

Lucero, Mario. “Product Backlog – Deep Model.” Agilelucero, 8 Oct. 2014. Web.

“PI Planning.” Scaled Agile, n.d. Web.

Pichler, Roman. “The Product Roadmap and the Product Backlog.” Roman Pichler, 9 Sept. 2014. Accessed Feb. 2019.

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Schuurman, Robbin. “10 Tips for Product Owners on Product Backlog Management.” Burozeven, 20 Nov. 2017. Accessed Feb. 2019.

Srinivasan, Vibhu. “Product Backlog Management: Tips from a Seasoned Product Owner.” Agile Alliance, n.d. Accessed Feb. 2019.

Todaro, Dave. “Splitting Epics and User Stories.” Ascendle, n.d. Accessed Feb. 2019.

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Bibliography (Roadmap)

Bastow, Janna. “Creating Agile Product roadmaps Everyone Understands.” ProdPad, 22 Mar. 2017. Accessed Sept. 2018.

Bastow, Janna. “The Product Tree Game: Our Favorite Way To Prioritize Features.” ProdPad, 21 Feb. 2016. Accessed Sept. 2018.

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Supporting Research

Transformation topics and supporting Info-Tech research to make the journey easier, with less rework.

Supporting research and services

Improving IT alignment

Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

Includes a "Strategy on a page" template

Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

Create an IT View of the Service Catalog

Unlock the full value of your service catalog with technical components.

Application Portfolio Management Foundations

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

Supporting research and services

Shifting toward Agile DevOps

Agile/DevOps Resource Center

Tools and advice you need to be successful with Agile.

Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

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

Perform an Agile Skills Assessment

Being Agile isn't about processes, it's about people.

Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery

Projects and products are not mutually exclusive.

Supporting research and services

Shifting toward product management

Make the Case for Product Delivery

Align your organization on the practices to deliver what matters most.

Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

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

Deliver Digital Products at Scale

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

Build a Better Product Owner

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

Supporting research and services

Improving value and delivery metrics

Build a Value Measurement Framework

Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

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

Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.

Supporting research and services

Improving governance, prioritization, and value

Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

Maximize Business Value from IT Through Benefits Realization

Embed benefits realization into your governance process to prioritize IT spending and confirm the value of IT.

Drive Digital Transformation With Platform Strategies

Innovate and transform your business models with digital platforms.

Succeed With Digital Strategy Execution

Building a digital strategy is only half the battle: create a systematic roadmap of technology initiatives to execute the strategy and drive digital transformation.

Build a Value Measurement Framework

Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

Supporting research and services

Improving requirements management and quality assurance

Requirements Gathering for Small Enterprises

Right-size the guidelines of your requirements gathering process.

Improve Requirements Gathering

Back to basics: great products are built on great requirements.

Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

Build quality into every step of your SDLC.

Automate Testing to Get More Done

Drive software delivery throughput and quality confidence by extending your automation test coverage.

Manage Your Technical Debt

Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.

Create a Business Process Management Strategy

Avoid project failure by keeping the "B" in BPM.

Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook

Optimize and automate your business processes with a user-centric approach.

Create a Winning BPI Playbook

Don't waste your time focusing on the "as is." Focus on the improvements and the "to be."

Supporting research and services

Improving release management

Optimize Applications Release Management

Build trust by right-sizing your process using appropriate governance.

Streamline Application Maintenance

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

Streamline Application Management

Move beyond maintenance to ensure exceptional value from your apps.

Optimize Change Management

Right-size your change management process.

Manage Your Technical Debt

Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.

Improve Application Development Throughput

Drive down your delivery time by eliminating development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality.

Supporting research and services

Business relationship management

Embed Business Relationship Management

Leverage knowledge of the business to become a strategic IT partner.

Improving security

Build an Information Security Strategy

Create value by aligning your strategy to business goals and business risks.

Develop and Deploy Security Policies

Enhance your overall security posture with a defensible and prescriptive policy suite.

Simplify Identity and Access Management

Leverage risk- and role-based access control to quantify and simplify the IAM process.

Supporting research and services

Improving and supporting business-managed applications

Embrace Business-Managed Applications

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

Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices

Ensure your software systems solution is architected to reflect stakeholders’ short-and long-term needs.

Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code

Extend IT, automation, and digital capabilities to the business with the right tools, good governance, and trusted organizational relationships.

Build Your First RPA Bot

Support RPA delivery with strong collaboration and management foundations.

Automate Work Faster and More Easily With Robotic Process Automation

Embrace the symbiotic relationship between the human and digital workforce.

Supporting research and services

Improving business intelligence, analytics, and reporting

Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results

Enable the business to achieve operational excellence, client intimacy, and product leadership with an innovative, Agile, and fit-for-purpose data architecture practice.

Build a Reporting and Analytics Strategy

Deliver actionable business insights by creating a business-aligned reporting and analytics strategy.

Build Your Data Quality Program

Quality data drives quality business decisions.

Design Data-as-a-Service

Journey to the data marketplace ecosystems.

Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

Build an Application Integration Strategy

Level the table before assembling the application integration puzzle or risk losing pieces.

Appendix

Pulse survey results

Pulse survey (N=18): What are the key components of product/service ownership?

Pulse Survey (N=18): What are the key individual skills for a product/service owner?

Other choices entered by respondents:

• Anticipating client needs, being able to support delivery in all phases of the product lifecycle, adaptability, and ensuring a healthy backlog (at least two sprints’ worth of work).
• Requirements elicitation and prioritization.
• The key skill is being product-focused to ensure it provides value for competitive advantage.

Pulse Survey (N=18): What are three things an outstanding product/service owner does that an average one doesn’t?