Roles and Responsibilities: Product Managament
This blog will help you understand the roles and responsibilities of Product Management. But before we deep dive into the roles and responsibilities, it would be great to have a quick overview of what exactly Product Management is.
What is Product Management?
Product Management is the function responsible for defining desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions that meet customer needs and supporting development across the product life cycle. The role scales with the complexity of the Solution. For some solutions, the Product Management function may be carried out by a single Product Manager. For others, a team of Product Managers may be required.
Roles and Responsibilities of Product Management
Project Management’s responsibilities in SAFe can be illustrated as shown in the following image.
First Responsibility: Exploring Markets and Users
The first responsibility can be further explained with the following sub-set responsibilities.
1. Conduct Primary and Secondary research
Product Management is supposed to leverage both primary and secondary research for optimizing product strategy. Primary data answers specific questions about product-market fit in specific usage contexts. Secondary data reveals macro-level trends across broad cross-sections of the market.
2. Apply market segmentation
Users have varied needs/challenges based upon various characteristics such as geography, demographics, psychographics. It is the responsibility of PM to divide customers into relevant segments based on characteristics and define solutions for most appealing segments.
3. Identify Market rhythms and events
Market rhythms are patterns in supply and demand such as seasonality which could be industry specificand help plan release schedules. Market events are ad hoc events such as regulatory changes, competitor releases etc. which are sporadic and prompt PM to plan out of cycle releases.
4. Understand end-user needs
PM uses various techniques such as LEAN UX, HCD(human-centered design), journey mapping to evolve product strategy in alignment with the ever-changing needs of the customer.
Second Responsibility: Connecting with the Customer
1. Adopt a customer centric mindset
Effective Product Management is driven by a customer-centric mindset in which the customer is placed at the center of every decision. This customer centric mindset helps us to create desirable, viable, feasible and sustainable solutions.
2. Empathize with the customer
Solutions must deliver valuable experiences to the customer. PM should lead that using tools such as empathy maps, empathy interviews and customer personas.
3. Apply design thinking
PMs should apply design thinking to solution development. It is a combination of divergent and convergent techniques that are applied to understand a problem, design a solution, and deliver that solution to the market.
The desired outcome is aligned i.e. to deliver solutions that are desirable, viable, feasible and sustainable.
4. Involve the customer continuously
Agile product development requires ongoing planning, doing, checking, and adjusting. It’s the responsibility of the PM to arrange for the feedback loops during various stages including:
- Continuous exploration
- PI planning
- System demos
Third Responsibility: Defining Product strategy, vision and roadmaps
1. 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.
2. Establish equitable value exchange models
Following SAFe principle #1 – Take an economic view, Product Management identifies the specific value desired by customers from a solution in addition to the value the enterprise requires in return. An equitable exchange of value between the enterprise and its customers ensures solutions provide mutual, sustainable benefits.
3. Create and communicate a compelling vision
PM continuously refines and communicates the product vision to the ART. At the beginning of PI planning event, PM presents the same to everyone highlighting features and milestones. PM should also meet with solution management and align it with solution stakeholders and vision during pre-PI planning meeting.
4. Manage flexible roadmaps
The Product strategy and vision evolves in response to continuously evolving market dynamics, as an outcome the roadmaps that they influence should also evolve.
Fourth Responsibility: Managing and prioritizing the ART Backlog
1. Guiding feature creation
As the PO guides story creation, PM guides feature creation ensuring that each created feature contains a clear benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria.
2. Prioritize features with WSJF
Product Management should ensure that the backlog is reprioritized with Weighted Short Job First (WSJF) before each PI Planning session.
3. Support Architectural Runway
While Product Management is not expected to drive technological decisions, they are expected to support the ongoing development and maintenance of Architectural Runway. In collaboration with System Architects, they negotiate capacity allocations that balance the concentration of business and enabler features in the ART backlog
4. Participate in ART events
PM must actively participate in ART events and impart knowledge, collect feedback and address product related issues.
Fifth Responsibility: Delivering Value
1. Collaborate throughout the value stream
Product Managers with internal customers collaborate with Development Value Stream stakeholders and participants to ensure solutions deliver value to the enterprise. Product Managers with external customers collaborate with people and teams in the Operational Value Stream to deliver and maintain in-market solutions. Also its the responsibility of the Product Management to collaborate across the Solution Train to manage inter-ART dependencies and ensure timely integration of their products into large solutions.
2. Ensure product completeness
Product management ensures that solutions meet a wide range of customer needs. ‘Whole solutions’ are designed from the customer’s perspective and comprise multiple features that together deliver complete, engaging end-user experiences.
3. 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.
4. Release value on demand
In Continuous delivery pipeline, deployment is decoupled from release. Hence PMs release with input from customers and stakeholders to ensure that they derive maximum value.
5. Meet Business goals
Product Management is instrumental in defining the value of solutions within the enterprise context and tracking it to ensure business goals are achieved.
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