Mature and Scale Product Ownership
Strengthen the product owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.
Member Challenge
- Product owners must bridge the gap between the customers, operations, and delivery to ensure products continuously deliver increasing value.
- Product owners are often assigned to projects or product delivery without proper support, guidance, or alignment.
- In many organizations, the product owner role is not well-defined, serves as a proxy for stakeholder ownership, and lacks reinforcement of the key skills needed to be successful.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
A product owner is the CEO for their product. 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.
- Product and service ownership share the same foundation - 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.
- Product owners represent three primary perspectives: Business (externally 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.
- 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.
Impact and Result
- Create a culture of product management trust and empowerment with product owners aligned to your operational structure and product needs.
- Promote and develop true Agile skills among your product owners and family managers.
- Implement Info-Tech’s product owner capability model to define the role expectations and provide a development path for product owners.
Research & Tools
| Name | Actions |
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1. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Storyboard – Establish a culture of success for product management and mature product owner capabilities.
Strengthen the product owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.
- Establish a foundation for empowerment and success.
- Assign and align product owners with products and stakeholders.
- Mature product owner capabilities and skills.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Mature and Scale Product Ownership Storyboard
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2. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment – Determine your readiness for a product-centric culture based on Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G model.
Using Info-Tech’s CLAIM model, quickly determine your organization’s strengths and weaknesses preparing for a product culture. Use the heat map to identify key areas.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment
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3. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook – Playbook for product owners and product managers.
Use the blueprint exercises to build your personal product owner playbook. You can also use the workbook to capture exercise outcomes.
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Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook
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4. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook – Workbook for product owners and product managers.
Use this workbook to capture exercise outcomes and transfer them to your Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook (optional).
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Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook
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5. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Proficiency Assessment – Determine your current proficiency and improvement areas.
Product owners need to improve their core capabilities and real Agile skills. The assessment radar will help identify current proficiency and growth opportunities.
| Name | Actions |
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Mature and Scale Product Ownership Proficiency Assessment
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Onsite Workshop: Mature and Scale Product Ownership
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Do-It-Yourself Implementation
The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.
Project Accelerator Workshop
You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.
Module 1: Establish the foundation for product ownership
The Purpose
Establish the foundation for product ownership.
Key Benefits Achieved
Product owner playbook with role clarity and RACI.
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management. |
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| 1.2 Define your product management roles and names. |
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| 1.3 Assess your product management readiness. |
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| 1.4 Identify your primary product owner perspective. |
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| 1.5 Define your product owner RACI. |
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Module 2: Align product owners to products
The Purpose
Align product owners to products.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Assignment of resources to open products.
- A stakeholder management strategy.
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 2.1 Assign resources to your products and families. |
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| 2.2 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers. |
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| 2.3 Group stakeholders into categories. |
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| 2.4 Prioritize your stakeholders. |
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Module 3: Mature product owner capabilities
The Purpose
Mature product owner capabilities.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Assess your Agile product owner readiness
- Assess and mature product owner capabilities
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 3.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency. |
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| 3.2 Assess your vison capability proficiency. |
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| 3.3 Assess your leadership capability proficiency. |
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| 3.4 Assess your PLM capability proficiency. |
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| 3.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency. |
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| 3.6 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value. |
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