Product Category Team

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  3. System of Delivery
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  5. Structure
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  7. Product Category Team
The Product Category Team exists to maximize the flow of value through the organization by managing the throughput and value density, ensuring a focus on achieving business outcomes.

The Product Category Team is a value delivery structure. They focus on becoming risk and dependency aware, balancing capacity and demand, making work visible, and ensuring predictable throughput.

Structure

Team Definition, Roles & Responsibilities

Governance

Governance Capabilities, Governance Model & Meetings

​​​​​​​Metrics

Measurement & Tooling

Structure

Team Definition

The Product Category Team is a cross-functional team of leaders responsible for evaluating Epics and using the vision defined in the Epic to create Feature stubs for further elaboration at the Product Line Team level. The team is accountable for adjusting the proposed Features with respect to priority, time and cost constraints, and Dependencies. 

  • Clearly articulating vision and value 
  • Ensuring priorities are aligned with the strategic priorities 
  • Creating optionality through Features that maximize the amount of work not done to deliver on the desired outcomes and success criteria of Epics 
  • Orchestrating dependencies and risks

At this level, the team is responsible for prioritizing products and projects based on how/whether they help achieve larger organizational/business and strategic goals.

Roles & Responsibilities

Click on the icons/links below to read more details on Product Category Team Roles. 

Business Product Manager

Collaborates to establish product vision and identify new customer opportunities; ensures the solutions are valuable and successful; facilitates communication and relationships between Product Owners and technology; prioritizes and manages work intake. Read More

Portfolio Orchestrator

Ensures the Product Category Team has clarity of capacity and demand; provides oversight to maximize governing the flow of value; ensures Product Category decisions are in alignment with the strategy, budgets, and financial guidelines; acts as the escalation point for delivery issues or de-conflicting dependencies that affect multiple teams that need resolution by the Product Category Team. Read More

Product Architect

Aligns products with business capabilities to maximize value; identifies and plans capabilities that must be improved to fulfill product value propositions; makes cost-benefit trade-offs visible so that the Business Product Owner can make evidence-driven decisions; ensures products and product lines align with the organization’s business architecture. Read More

Strategic Product Designer

Creates the strategy to align the product vision for the user experience; ensures the solutions are usable. Read More

Orchestration Model with Supporting Roles

Team Definition

  • Liaison: An individual who works closely with a team. The team’s go-to person if close orchestration is required 
  • Service: Order as a service when requirements are clear; order from a service catalog 
  • As Needed: Collaboration as needed; may continue to be orchestrated by a Portfolio Orchestrator. 

Meetings

The three meetings/working sessions the Product Category Team performs are below.

Intake & Demand Planning

4 hours monthly, ideally as 1 working session

The team discusses prospective epics and develop a shared understanding of priorities, trade-offs, options and decision-parameters for: the key intake and alignment points; prospective Initiatives/Epics Solution approaches and options; Initiatives/Epics Release Targeting timeframe.

Learn more about Intake & Demand Planning Meetings

Progress Review

2 hours bi-weekly (once per sprint)​

The team “Walks the Kanban” discussing Initiatives / Epics (and child Features) underway and undergoing validation, ensuring a shared understanding of current progress, dependencies and outstanding risks. The team also assesses metric trends and determines if acceptable or further investigation/mitigation steps to rectify are warranted.

Learn more about Progress Review Meetings

Portfolio Restrospective

1 hour monthly operations review
4-hour quarterly working session

The entire Product Category Team participates to review how the delivery system is working and plan improvements. The team reviews performance data and analysis, evaluates different options to address issues, decides on a course of action, and creates an action plan.

Learn more about Portfolio Retrospective Meetings

Governance

Governance Capabilities

Here are the Product Category Team’s high-level goals for each capability.

Strategic Alignment     |     Solution Vision     |     Clarity and Capacity     |     Execution     |     Measure Effectiveness     
System of Delivery

Governance Model

Explore Product Category Team States by Workflow State

Portfolio Alignment     |     Portfolio Prioritization     |     Solution Definition     |     Release Targeting     |     In Progress     |     Epic Validation     |     Epic Completed

Metrics

Product Category Level Metrics

Metrics Approach

Conceptual Level (Goal)

A goal to meet a specific purpose is defined for a team or system, focusing on demonstrating a meaningful outcome for the business.

Operational Level (question)

A crafted set of questions define an objective model for assessing the achievement of our goals.

Quantitative Level (Metric)

Based on the objective model, a set of metrics is associated with every question to answer it measurably.

Predictability

Quality

Early ROI