"Product Managers, Product Owners, Scalable Agile Product Models:" what do the first few scale-ups of product management look like, from one end-to-end PM to several to a multi-tier model? And what are some of the challenges/pitfalls?

1. Product Managers, Product Owners,
Scalable Agile Product Models
Rich Mironov
April 5, 2017
Product Tank Dublin
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2. • Veteran product manager/exec/strategist
• Organizing agile product organizations
• Smokejumper VP Products
• HP, Tandem, Sybase, 6 B2B startups
as “product guy” or CEO
• The Art of Product Management
• Founded Product Camp, blog since 2002
About Rich Mironov
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3. • Unhelpful: “We’ve created product owners based on
scrum definitions. How does our business fit in?
• Backward: “We hired both product managers and
product owners. How do we divide responsibilities and
ship successful products?”
• Better: “What are the essential Jobs To Be Done for
product folks, and how can we help them succeed?”
Framing the Right Question
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4. • Customers/user understand their problems
• Customers (usually) mis-design solutions to their problems
• Customers and sales channels generalize every
complaint into universal market requirement
• Development will build what we
tell them to build
• …If we don’t include them in
problem/solution framing
Important Constraints
(How Real World Works)
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5. 1. Understand opportunities to deliver customer value
• Problems before solutions across many customers/users
2. Validate; estimate value and solution cost; iterate
• Collaboratively with development, UX and customers
3. Prioritize too many opportunities
4. Make time/feature/quality trade-offs
Product Management
Jobs To Be Done
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6. Different organizations measure success differently
• Product companies: total revenue or profitability
• Enlightened Internal IT: actual cost savings or
increased revenue
• Benighted Internal IT: on time, on budget, on spec
• Assumes we asked for right things, in
right order, which had forecasted impact
Scorekeeping Matters
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7. There’s nothing more wasteful
than brilliantly engineering a
product (project) that
doesn’t matter.
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8. Slicing the Problem: Small
Product at Product Company (1)
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One development
team: transactions,
reporting, infra…
Development
(massively simplified)
JTBD/segments
(massively simplified)
End-to-end product manager
• Does own discovery/interviews
• Opportunities, priorities, trade-offs
• Market outcomes ($, €, £, ¥)

9. Slicing the Problem: Mid-Sized
Product at Product Company (2)
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Development
(massively simplified)
JTBD/segments
(massively simplified)
Several end-to-end product managers
Tech value stream:
DB, security, infra
Tech value stream:
core transactions
Tech value stream:
Reporting, archiving

10. Slicing the Problem: Very Large
Product at Product Company (3)
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…
JTBD/segments
(massively simplified)
“technical”
product managers
DB, security
Reporting
partner APIs
Admin/LDAP
Development
(massively simplified)
market/segment
managers
Core transactions

11. • No single (technical) product manager delivers value
• But still need to manage single backlog/priority per team
• Market/segment managers have conflicting priorities:
influencers/lobbyists, not deciders
• Segments have different “mix” of needs
• Technical product managers lose touch with real users
• Requires portfolio-level priorities, solution scope,
architecture, UX, pricing (value)
• Tendency to allocate teams entirely to market initiatives
• “Postpone” quality, tech debt, research à threadbare feature factory
• Stop investing in core capabilities, and usability
• Little decision scope of product managers
Scale-Up Challenges for Large Products
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12. One Option: Team-Level Budgeting
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Averaged across a quarter… for example...
• 50-60% of team points against global initiatives
• 20% against local capabilities & features
• Requires that product managers stay in close touch with users
• 20% against quality, automation, DevOps
• May delegate decisions on this to team

13. Very similar challenges:
• Budget approvals rarely align with actual value
• Demands arrive as solutions (not problems), as defined
by less-technical Business Unit owner or lead user
• Lead user often not representative of user base
Does product owner have right/power to
• Confirm/validate problem, then solution?
• Reassess internal savings, adoption, rollout, impact?
• Set/change team priorities?
What About Product Owners in
IT Organizations?
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14. 1. Understand user base, opportunities for value
• Problems, then solutions
2. Validate, estimate value and solution cost, iterate
• Collaborate with development, design and multiple
3. Prioritize (push) for what matters most
4. Ask (push) for outcome metrics, measurement
5. Celebrate ship dates and user/customer wins
Best (Empowered) IT Product Owners
Look Like Product Managers
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15. CONTACT
Rich Mironov, CEO
Mironov Consulting
233 Franklin St, Suite #308
San Francisco, CA 94102
RichMironov
@RichMironov
Rich@Mironov.com
+1-650-315-7394
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