Product Category Team Roles

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System of Delivery
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Structure
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Product Category Team
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Product Category Team Roles

A Product Category Team is a business structure, not a delivery structure. They focus on clearly articulating vision and value, ensuring priorities are aligned to the strategic priorities, orchestrating dependencies and risks, balancing capacity and demand, making work visible, and ensuring predictable throughput.

Collaborate to establish product vision and identify new customer opportunities

Why this is important:

The Business Product Manager establishes the vision and is ultimately responsible for strategic business outcomes

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Communication of the strategic vision and outcomes to Product Category, Product Line, and Delivery Teams
Research to understand who the right customers are and what problems are the most important to them
Determine the desired impact on the market and hypothesize how customer behaviors need to change to reach that impact

Doing this successfully results in:

Organization can effectively understand customers and the market to drive business strategic outcomes

Ensure the solutions are valuable and successful

Why this is important:

The Business Product Manager is responsible for determining how to address the market demand

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Define business outcomes and measurable success criteria for Epics
Provide final accountability for what will be built
Continually mature the backlog in collaboration with the Product Category Team and stakeholders from the Product Line Teams, focusing on profitability of the product (ROI)
Work with stakeholders and teams to make economic tradeoffs in the face of System of Delivery constraints

Doing this successfully results in:

Shared understanding of what “done” looks like to achieve strategic business outcomes
Value flowing more readily through the system with less rework
Faster cycle time, and shorter time to market

Facilitate communication and relationships between product and technology

Why this is important:

Balance key stakeholder expectations by managing relationships

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Manage the relationships between the business and the technology team
Coordinate the efforts with other departments and organizations within the enterprise
Understand the economic tradeoffs between solution options presented by the technology team

Doing this successfully results in:

Shared understanding of decisions and the decision-making process across stakeholders
Better orchestration and management of dependencies and risks
Lower last-minute expediting

Prioritize and manages work intake

Why this is important:

Balance competing interests to ensure the organization is executing against the strategic vision

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Prioritize incoming ideas
Balance demand and make tradeoffs based on capacity
Communicate priority decisions to the organization

Doing this successfully results in:

Shared vision of a prioritized roadmap that is aligned to the strategic vision of the organization
Work aligned to the current strategic priorities

Ensure the Product Category Team has clarity of capacity and demand

Why this is important:

A clear understanding of team capacity is fundamental to being able to make and meet commitments effectively

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Ensure that there is an understanding of the throughput and cycle time for both Epics and Features
Ensure that the Product Category Team has visibility into the financial capacity related targets and how they are executing against them
Ensure with the Product Orchestrators that the ALM is being used correctly to enable metrics

Doing this successfully results in:

Team will be able to demonstrate predictability and manage expectations more effectively
Team will have increased optionality for how to use capacity to increase value

Provide oversight to maximize governing the flow of value

Why this is important:

Team is able to focus on the moving value through the system effectively

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Align Team Processes with the organization’s governance model and industry best practices
Assist in Product Category Team Assessments and ensures they are completed on a regular cadence
Actively capture and manage risks, impediments, dependencies, and assumptions with the Product Category Team and focus on reducing impact early and often
Coordinate day-to-day activities of the Product Category Team

Doing this successfully results in:

Key decisions and insights available for the whole team
Value flowing effectively through the Product Category Team Epic Kanban
Improved predictability through early visibility and management of risks, impediments, dependencies, and assumptions

Ensure Product Category decisions are in alignment with the strategy, budgets, and financial guidelines

Why this is important:

Critical to the organization being able to meet strategic outcomes

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Epics and Features with clear connection to the strategic vision with success criteria that reinforces that connection
Align solutions decisions with the strategic vision and reduce organizational risk in a manner to maintain alignment with strategy, budget, and financial guidelines
Ensure that the Product Category Team has visibility into the budget and financial targets and how they are executing against them

Doing this successfully results in:

Meeting strategy, budget, and financial guidelines
Value flowing effectively through the System of Delivery

Escalation point for delivery issues or de-conflicting dependencies that affect multiple teams and that need resolution by the Product Category Team

Why this is important:

Product Line and Delivery Teams have a primary point of entry for raising issues to the Product Category Team

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Have a primary escalation point for Product Orchestrators
Orchestrate Product Category Team System of Delivery (SoD) communications
Ensure that issues are communicated to, managed, and resolved by the Product Category Team

Doing this successfully results in:

Increased shared understanding of value and communication throughout the System of Delivery (SoD)

Align products with the organization’s business capabilities to maximize value

Why this is important:

Large organizations struggle to provide consistently high-quality experiences to their customers. Often this happens when different parts of the organization independently build redundant or competing capabilities.

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Map the products to capabilities and dependencies to ensure consistency of the experience as well as effectiveness of operation
Validate that proposed epics make consistent use of capabilities within the Product Category
Orchestrate changes across Product Categories to ensure consistency of capabilities across Product Categories

Doing this successfully results in:

Products that delight customers and can be effectively operated
Consistency of customer experience across products
Increased health in the business architecture

Identify and plan capabilities that must be built or improved to fulfill product value propositions

Why this is important:

Product value propositions are delivered through value streams and business capabilities. New product ideas often require organizations to either enhance existing capabilities or build completely new ones. Delivery of capabilities must precede market introductions of products that rely on the capabilities

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Identify new capabilities required to support a product, as well as enhancements to existing capabilities
Conduct make vs. buy analysis for new capabilities
Provide input to the sequence of delivery for new and enhanced capabilities so they are ready to be consumed by product line teams when needed
Ensure product designs include business processes, people & roles, assets (information and physical) required to operate products in market

Doing this successfully results in:

Capabilities are ready for integration into products when needed
Capabilities are feasible to operate when products are released to market
Capabilities can be operated at an acceptable cost structure

Make cost benefit tradeoffs visible so Business Product Manager can make evidence driven decisions

Why this is important:

Companies often develop products without consideration of the business processes, people, and other assets required to operate the products in market. Understanding what is required to build and operate a product enables the Product Manager to effectively make cost benefit tradeoffs.

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Map capabilities to the required people, processes and supporting assets, and prioritize work in the Epic roadmap to build the most valuable items first
Conduct usage and cost analysis supporting the Product Manager in development of product profitability analyses
Ensure that costs to operate capabilities are acceptable as product usage grows

Doing this successfully results in:

Confidence that once deployed to market a product can be operated profitably as it gains market share
Rapid validation of benefits associated with a product

Ensure products and product lines align with organization’s business architecture

Why this is important:

Large organizations often have high degrees of capability redundancy across Product Categories. By leveraging existing capabilities across the organization, we can not only improve product time to market, but also consistency of the customer experience and return on investment in capabilities

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Identify common / redundant capabilities and prioritize work to standardize / consolidate / divest redundancies
Ensure products are implemented in a manner consistent with the organization’s business architecture including strategy execution, value streams, and capabilities
Develop use vs. enhance vs. build new analyses for capabilities based on objective criteria, facilitate executives’ buy in to decisions

Doing this successfully results in:

Increased asset efficiency at business capability level
Defensible decisions about when to reuse, replace, or build redundant capabilities
Increased consistency of the organization’s business architecture across Product Categories over time

Create the strategy to align the product vision for the user experience

Why this is important:

Understanding the core need of users across products helps create a consistent useable product experience
Customers are able to use the products to achieve their goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in the context of use

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Create with Product Designers testable hypothesis that answer the user’s core needs
Design the product based on personas
Conduct ideation, concept, and usability testing
Prototype designs to share with the Product Category Team, Product Designers, and others as needed

Successful execution of the role results in:

Customers who can achieve their goals with a positive brand experience
Fewer support calls about how to use the system
Positive customer experiences that increase customer efficiency, loyalty, and new product adoption

Ensure the solutions are usable

Why this is important:

Customers are able to use the products to achieve their goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in the context of use

Key things that need to be accomplished:

Conduct market research to understand customer goals, needs, motivation, and behaviors
Create a shared vision of the desired product design
Understand the needs of the individual products from their Product Designers, and incorporate them into the product design framework

Doing this successfully results in:

Provide positive customer experiences that increase customer’s efficiency, loyalty, and new product adoption