The Art of Agile Product Ownership: A Guide for Product Managers, Business Analysts, and Entrepreneurs

Product Information

Regardless of whether a solution is consumed internally or sold externally, Product Management is essential to its success. This article describes Product Management’s multi-faceted role in SAFe and how it enables the continuous, sustained delivery of value. Key Collaborations Each ART builds and maintains (or shares) a Continuous Delivery Pipeline with the assets and technologies needed to deliver solution value as independently as possible. The first three elements of the pipeline work together to support the deployment of small batches of new functionality, which are released to meet market demands. Learn describes the practices needed to decide what should be done with the information gathered and prepare for the next learning loop through the CDP

Product Management requires a deep understanding of the customer. Customers determine the value of every solution and, thus, are an integral part of the Lean-Agile development process. Elaborate Stories – Stories are typically created before iteration execution but require ongoing elaboration. POs facilitate frequent conversations with their teams to resolve questions, manage dependencies, and communicate priorities that emerge as stories are implemented. This information also helps the team slice stories effectively to achieve increased velocity and shortened learning cycles. Enable operations– Product Management provides support and enablement to key functions in the operational value stream to ensure the full value of every release is realized. Marketing, sales, customer success, compliance, and channel partners, for example, receive assistance in preparing customers, stakeholders, and operations teams for product launches. Represent the end user – Through frequent interviews, gemba, and reporting, POs are strongly connected to the needs and experiences of their products’ end users. Objective insights about how end-users interact with solutions and the features they desire most ensure that the vision and roadmap contain real value. Malviya, Kartik. Lean UX versus Design Thinking. Medium, November 11, 2020. Retrieved October 11, 2023, from https://uxplanet.org/lean-ux-versus-design-thinking-3f9ebb8aef59Understanding the problem – The problem space is where designers explore the problem, including its complex nature, and get a clear definition of the problem, gaining insight into the requirements and benefits of a desirable solution. Build whole product solutions – Design whole product solutions for the user’s needs, ensuring that the initial and long-term user experiences are optimal and evolve as needed. Align strategy to business objectives– Product Management is responsible for aligning the product strategy, vision, and roadmap to the portfolio’s Strategic Themes and for maintaining alignment with the Portfolio Vision, Lean Budgets, Guardrails, and, when necessary, the solution vision. When assuming the role of Epic Owner, a Product Manager also defines and governs the epic’s Lean Business Case. DevOps aligns efforts across development, operations, and other business functions to achieve an optimal balance of speed and stability. Figure 6. DevOps fosters collaboration across all functions Innovation and Planning (IP) – IP Iterations occur at the end of every PI and provide an estimating guard band (buffer) as well as dedicated time for PI planning, innovation, continuing education, and infrastructure work.

The PO is ultimately responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the Agile team, which requires the PO to ensure that the right solutions are built and that they are built the right way. However, the PO cannot accomplish this alone. These icons can also be used to visualize the likely interactions between the teams through their relative positioning. The names of the specific teams can then be added to these icons for a complete picture. Visualizing the teams on the ART in this manner helps to compare and contrast the merits of competing designs and also provides an indication of how well any particular design is aligned to the flow of value. Figure 5. Applying team topologies to Agile teams on an ART Critical ART Roles In a flow-based system, establishing routine development activities on a fast, synchronized PI cadence—a regular predictive rhythm of team and ART events—is a proven strategy to manage the inherent variability in product development. The following activities support this cadence: Businesses need to balance their execution focus with a customer focus to help ensure that they are creating the right solutions, for the right customers, at the right time. APD is grounded in customer-centricity, design thinking, and Lean UX putting the customer at the center of every decision. It applies design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable. Agile Teams – Agile Teams embrace the ‘Agile Manifesto’ and SAFe Core Values and Principles. They apply Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, and other Built-In Quality practices.Used to store information about the time a sync with the lms_analytics cookie took place for users in the Designated Countries