5.1 Apply Foundational Concepts

5.1.2 Set Up the Team for Success

Guide to Product Ownership Analysis

IIBA.org KnowledgeHub Guide to Product Ownership Analysis 5. The POA Framework 5.1 Apply Foundational Concepts 5.1.2 Set Up the Team for Success

POA Framework

5.1 Apply Foundational Concepts

Organizations must vie for customers' attention in a competitive landscape…

POA Framework

5.1.1 Set Up the Organization for Success

Either an organization supports product teams, or it hinders them. The…

A team that confidently embraces the challenge of creating the next successful product has:

Effective communication and collaboration,
Use of analysis techniques, and
Expanded Product Ownership role.

Organizational policies addressing the help ensure teams are well-equipped for success.

Every organization wants high performing teams. POA Practitioners can help support high performing teams by:

Structuring the work effectively from day one,
Promoting and supporting the use of effective analysis practices, and
Embracing the multi-faceted aspects of their responsibilities.

Effectively structure the work

Every product, team, and organization have a different context. It is critical to consider context when modifying the approach. Several factors need to be considered to help individuals customize their interactions as POA Practitioners. Decisions made early in establishing team norms pay dividends in team communication and collaboration. The Product Owner does not own these processes but sets the example and tone for them.

Promote and support the use of analysis practices

Good analysis is a crucial part of a POA Practitioner's work. Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. Its principles and practices are powerful when applied to product development in which the customer is the key stakeholder. Combined with the application of the seven principles of agile business analysis is a recipe for success.

When conducting analysis, Product Owners face challenges:

Shorter deliverable timeframes,
Time and resource constraints, and
Lack of business analysis experience.

Regardless of the challenges, understanding the benefits of business analysis, and applying basic principles will help Product Owners be successful.

Embrace their multi-faceted role

Effective Product Ownership addresses tactical and strategic aspects of product development work. While providing daily guidance to the delivery team, the Product Owner also ensures that value being created by the team remains aligned with:

Customer needs,
Organizational goals,
Industry changes, and
The dynamic marketplace.

Given the complexity and urgency for creating products that resonate with customers, it is important to set up the team for success. Product Owners face a variety of circumstances that are organization-specific and may differ from one product build or delivery team to the next. Factors that influence working relationships and impact a team's ability to become a high performing team include:
Structure of Work.png

Team Location: A co-located team is easier to work with, but many teams are distributed or virtual. Communication becomes more complex, making sharing pertinent information challenging across time zones. The POA Practitioner needs to understand this context and make themselves available to the team.
Type of Organization:
- Corporations,
- Non-profit corporations,
- Government ministries, and
- Government agencies, etc.

Organizations can also be described by their structure:

Functional,
Divisional,
Matrix, and
Network, etc.

Complicating matters, different types of organizations may partner to bring a shared product to market. Each scenario comes with challenges for the Product Owner, often stemming from organization culture associated with different types of organizations.

Type of Product Owner Role: Different types of products require a Product Owner or POA Practitioner with different skills and experience. However, sometimes the ideal skills may not be available. It is important that POA Practitioners acquire the support they need to successfully support the team.
Type of Initiative:
- New product development,
- Upgrade to the existing product, and
- Implement a new product.

Product Owners may need to modify their approach based on the type of initiative the team is asked to deliver.

Type of Product: Regardless of how an organization defines a product, it is important to understand that the type of product being created may determine what kind of Product Owner is needed.
- Example: If the team is delivering enhancements to a proprietary app for drop shipping and needs the app to integrate with a payments’ platform like Stripe, engaging a practitioner that has experience with these technologies, as well as knowledge of payment gateways, would be ideal.
Product Lifecycle Stage: Recognizing where a product is in the product lifecycle is an important consideration for the Product Owner. A practitioner may be ideal for helping a delivery team create a new product but may not be a good choice to revive a previously successful product.
Scope of Responsibility: The delivery team needs time and energy from their Product Owner to deliver. In many cases, it is impossible to get dedicated effort from a busy Product Owner who may be juggling numerous priorities, including other product deliveries and organizational commitments. The Product Owner's primary responsibility is to maximize the value being created by the team. That is impossible without focused effort. A Product Owner should not be responsible for more than two initiatives at a time.

These factors impact the working relationship between the Product Owner and the rest of the team, as well as how work is executed.

Setting the team up for success requires customizing communication and collaboration strategies to effectively support the team. Having the right people in the team is key.

POA Practitioners should ask themselves if they are right for the job. If they are not, they should recommend someone else or identify what is needed for POA-related work. Product Owners must get the support they need. They need to develop communication and collaboration strategies to manage interactions with the team.

POA Techniques to Set Up the Team for Success

Agile Extension Techniques

Planning Workshop: Create a shared understanding of:
- The approach to product creation,
- Best structure for the work, and
- Set up the team for success.

BABOK ®Guide Techniques

Decision Analysis: Assess the context, the challenges, and potential decisions to help make sound decisions.
Interviews: Elicit information about the initiative to help determine the ideal Product Owner or help the Product Owner create communication and collaboration strategies.
Risk Analysis and Management: Assess the context for the work to be done and make decisions on how to best support the team as a Product Owner.

Case Study: Identifying When Need is Needed- Cell Phone Manufacturer

Background
Natalia was one of two Product Owners at ABC Corp, a mid-sized cell phone manufacturing company. As a small organization, both Product Owners typically had three product build initiatives. One of the teams Natalia supported completed delivery, which reduced her workload to two initiatives.

Cell phone manufacturers generally release new phones or upgrades in the fall to January timeframe, in order to coincide with major consumer electronics trade shows. A competitor announced the release of an upgraded cell phone three months prior to the typical new release timeframe.

ABC Corp management decided to respond quickly, and Natalia met with her manager to discuss a new opportunity.

Challenge
At the meeting, Natalia's manager informed her that a team had been assembled to add the new features introduced by the competitor into an existing ABC Corp manufactured cell phone. The upgraded phone needed to be ready in three months to be unveiled at the fall trade shows. Natalia was concerned about the new commitment added to a busy workload. She asked for time to think about how to best address the challenge and scheduled a follow-up meeting.

Outcome
Natalia knew she could not say "No, I cannot do it." She took pride in her craft and always found a way to produce results. She assessed what it would take for her to support the team and help achieve the desired outcomes.

She met with key people that she thought could provide information about the new initiative. Natalia spoke with two individuals who shared information about the competitors' upgraded phone. She also spoke with the ABC Corp manager for the cell phone that they were upgrading. During those discussions, Natalia considered:

The cell phone to be upgraded,
Technical challenges of upgrading it,
Size of the team,
Experience of the team, and
Location of the team.

Natalia formulated a strategy to support the work as the Product Owner. She concluded that it would be a challenge to find the time to be an effective Product Owner while working on two other initiatives. Natalia decided that engaging a Business Analysis Professional as a Proxy Product Owner was the best strategy. She identified Raphael as the Proxy Product Owner since she knew he could perform the detailed work, such as backlog management. Raphael was a respected Business Analysis Professional with the underlying competencies and professional maturity to represent her as the Product Owner when she was not available.

Natalia met with her manager the next day and described what she needed to effectively support the new initiative as the Product Owner. Her manager congratulated Natalia on finding a way forward and agreed to make Raphael available.

Lessons Learned
Smaller organizations often have more work to do than people to do it, and new, urgent work routinely disrupts ongoing work. The challenge is to find a way to address these urgent challenges while minimizing any negative impact to ongoing work. For Product Owners in this situation, partnering with a Proxy Product Owner can be a powerful strategy. When a Business Analysis Professional is partnered with a Product Owner to support the POA-related work, success rates increase. The Product Owner partnering with a Proxy Product Owner can be a very powerful strategy, particularly when the Product Owner is constrained by other time commitments.

Good analysis is a crucial part of a Product Owner's work.

Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.

— (BABOK® Guide).

Its principles and practices are powerful when applied to product development where the customer is the key stakeholder. Combining that with the seven principles of agile business analysis results in a recipe for success.

Effective analysis ensures a delivery team creates high-value products for their customers, and organizations deliver measurable value. It helps:

Launch products that meet customer expectations,
Improve competitive positioning, and
Drive organizational success.

Product Owners face many challenges when conducting analysis:

Shorter deliverable timeframes,
Time and resource constraints, and
Lack of business analysis experience.

Regardless of the challenges, understanding the benefits of business analysis, and applying basic principles will help Product Owners be successful.

How POA Helps Create Customer Focused Products

Creating Products Customers Care About
Delivering high-value products requires the Product Owner to maintain focus and direct the team's attention.

Objective	Rationale
Intimately understand customers	Identify opportunities to delight customers: Understand customer problems, Their challenges, and Their aspirations. Clarify the most important customer needs that the product needs to satisfy.
Engage key stakeholders	POA is a team sport. It takes more than the delivery team to deliver a successful product.
Define product value	Understand how: The customer perceives value, and How to best deliver that value. Ensure organizational goals and objectives are met.
Co-Create for maximum impact	Engage customers and stakeholders during product build to ensure ongoing alignment as the product design emerges and the product evolves.
Let the product emerge	Realize the importance of ongoing touchpoints with customers to maximize opportunities to learn what customers really need.
Maximize product value	Focus on maximizing value while minimizing the work. A constant focus on value creation allows the team to avoid waste while building the highest value features.

POA Techniques to Create Customer Focused Products

Agile Extension Techniques
Any technique in the Agile Extension can be used based on context and the desired outcomes wanted, including:

Backlog refinement
Behaviour driven development
Impact mapping
Job stories
Kano analysis
Minimal viable product
Personas
Planning workshops
Portfolio Kanban
Product roadmap
Purpose alignment model
Real options

Relative estimation
Retrospectives
Reviews
Spikes
Storyboarding
Story decomposition
Story elaboration
Story mapping
User stories
Value modelling
Value stream mapping
Visioning

BABOK® Guide Techniques
Any technique in the BABOK Guide can be used based on context and the outcomes including:

Acceptance and evaluation criteria
Backlog management
Balanced scorecard
Benchmarking and market analysis
Brainstorming
Business capability analysis
Business Cases
Business model canvas
Business rules analysis
Collaborative games
Concept modelling
Data dictionary
Data flow diagrams
Data mining
Data modelling
Decision analysis
Decision modelling
Document analysis
Estimation
Financial analysis
Focus groups
Functional decomposition
Glossary
Interface analysis
Interviews

Item tracking
Lessons learned
Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Mind mapping
Non-functional requirements analysis
Observation
Organizational modelling
Prioritization
Process analysis
Process modelling
Prototyping
Reviews
Risk analysis and management
Roles and permission matrix
Root cause analysis
Scope modelling
Sequence diagrams
Stakeholder list, map, or personas
State modelling
Survey or Questionnaire
SWOT analysis
Use cases and scenarios
User stories
Vendor assessment
Workshops

Case Study: Using Customer Feedback - Cell Phone Manufacturer

Background
Natalia was the Product Owner for a team upgrading an existing cell phone to incorporate features that a competitor recently released in a new phone. This competitive product launch was a surprise. ABC Corp wanted to react quickly by offering their own competing product.

Challenge
The team started the work and realized that simply including the same features as the competing phone would not be enough. First to market is a competitive advantage in the cell phone business. The upgraded cell phone needed to provide additional features to have a chance of winning over customers. Which features should be included was an important decision, one that the team struggled with.

Natalia, the Product Owner, met with Raphael, an experienced Business Analysis Professional, to discuss how best to proceed.

Natalia highlighted the main points as:

Customers need to be engaged in the process to create excitement for the new offering,
The team needed to maximize the value delivered, given the short timeline, and
The organizational goals for the cell phone could only be achieved if customers were passionate about the new phone.

Action
Raphael recognized that Natalia was talking about POA objectives and recommended business analysis techniques that could be used to meet those objectives. He explained how the BACCM helps the team focus on the fundamental concepts of designing a solution for the stakeholder (i.e., the cell phone customer), which can only be done by intimately understanding needs. He emphasized addressing the most important needs, which can only be achieved by understanding context and then enabling change to encourage customers to purchase the new phone.

Raphael recommended:

That team build the cell phone in small increments, and each increment be reviewed with a small number of potential customers to elicit feedback.
That the feedback should inform decision-making about which features to incorporate into the next increment.
That customer feedback questions should be scripted to elicit the most important information about underserved needs.

Outcome
Natalia saw the value of the approach. It would help ensure they were constantly working on features that were most important to customers and not just what they thought would be important.

Natalia implemented the strategy and the team worked quickly to build one set of features after another, all steered by potential customers. A small group of potential customers turned into passionate advocates, and with each subsequent delivery of additional features, that group grew.

Lessons Learned
Applying the principles of agile business analysis, coupled with a toolbox of business analysis techniques, can be powerful in helping a team create desired outcomes effectively and efficiently. Having an experienced Business Analysis Professional on the team allows the team to 'right size' the practices and reduce the time it takes to elicit meaningful information.

The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product being created by the team. Responsibilities of the Product Owner (per The Scrum GuideTM - ©2020 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland) are:

Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal,
Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog Items,
Ordering Product Backlog Items, and
Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible, and understood.

Most agile methods and approaches have adopted these as the primary responsibilities of a Product Owner. However, given the complexity and challenges of creating successful products, it is time to expand the understanding of what an effective Product Owner can do.

Today's Product Owner
If the Product Owner is going to maximize the value being created by the team, the Product Owner's responsibilities need to evolve.

Product Owner	This Means
An advocate for customers	Build deep empathy for customers and understand their struggles, challenges, and opportunities. Interact with the emerging product as the customer would. Develop intimate understanding of the customer, to know how the customer would react.
Champion the work of the team	Be the "face of the product', representing what the team is building, and socializing the emerging product with key stakeholders, particularly customers. Assess and share feedback with the team.
Constantly envision and design for impact	Ensure the product being built will delight customers by exceeding their expectations of what they would reasonably expect. Ensure that organizational goals and objectives for the product will be met, and balance within the constraints for this work.
Regularly assess the emerging product foralignment with the intended design	Determine if the evolution of the product will have the intended impact, and if not, decide what needs to change. Ensure that the product: Maximizes the value delivered, Aligns with the customer’s most important needs, and Exceeds organizational objectives.
Embrace the unknown and be willing to learn	Assess sources of learning including: The competitive environment, Government regulations, Customer expectations, New technology, and Predictive and prescriptive modelling, etc. The most critical information about a product will come from customers or potential customers, so learn as much as possible from this constantly changing context.
Develop a sharp focus on value creation	Understand customers are the true arbitrators of value delivery. Put what has been built in front of customers (or potential customers). Determine what to build next, identify features to add, or make modifications to what was already built. The more the Product Owner can cycle through this process, the greater the team's chance of building a product that will delight customers while meeting organizational goals and objectives

The expanded role gives rise to the emerging concept that the Product Owner role is a shared responsibility across the product team with many practitioners contributing.

How POA Helps the Product Owner

If the Product Owner is going to truly maximize the value being created by the team in today's much more complex and intensely competitive environment, then the role must expand. The Product Owner must embrace the following responsibilities and become a customer advocate, team vanguard, design partner, product strategist, learning champion, and value driver.

Considering the Product Owner role to be a shared responsibility also gives the opportunity for the entire team to share responsibility for Product Ownership Analysis. When a specific competency is required, any member of the product team can step up to perform the responsibilities.

POA Techniques to Help the Product Owner

Agile Extension Techniques

Planning Workshop: Discuss the future of POA and the expanded responsibilities.
Value Stream Mapping: Understand how the expanded responsibilities for POA help create greater value across the entire customer experience.
Visioning: Understand how the expanded responsibilities for POA integrate with existing roles within the product lifecycle.

BABOK® Guide Techniques

Benchmarking and Market Analysis: Understand how other successful organizations define and use the Product Owner role.
Business Capability Analysis: Understand what organizational capabilities can be modified to integrate the expanded POA responsibilities.
Decision Analysis: Assess options for integrating the expanded POA responsibilities into the organization's product lifecycle management processes.
Interviews: Share information about how the expanded POA responsibilities can be integrated into the organization's product lifecycle processes.
Organizational Modelling: Identify how the expanded POA responsibilities can be integrated into reporting structures.
Roles and Permissions Matrix: Ensure coverage of activities across the product lifecycle by denoting responsibility, identifying roles, or communicating planned changes.
Stakeholder List, Map, or Personas: Identify individuals who need to be involved in decision-making around changes to roles and responsibilities.

Case Study: Identifying What a Product Owner Can Do - Cell Phone Manufacturer

Background
It was performance review time. Natalia realized that despite ABC Corp having adopted agile practices, some of the traditional practices were still in place. She reflected on her experience over the last year. Prior to joining ABC Corp, she was a Product Owner in an IT department where the teams she worked with developed software applications for internal use.

Although she enjoyed that work, she realized that her skills were getting stale, and a change was needed. Natalia realized she had adapted quickly to a more dynamic environment. She felt the new aspect of her job was the need to pay more attention to customers and their needs.

Natalia thought about the changes she had witnessed over the last two years at ABC Corp. She reflected on several significant improvements:

Adopting a product lifecycle approach,
Integrating practices for better alignment,
Aligning the work done by delivery teams to organizational strategy,
Using standard artefacts,
Structuring teams for success, and
Incorporating effective analysis techniques.

None of the changes were easy but they helped increase the quality of the results across ABC Corp.

Challenge
Natalia realized that was a lot of change in a relatively short time. However, the success rate for new cell phone launches was still lower than what it needed to be. Only a small portion of ABC Corp's investment in products, new ones, and upgrades, was paying off. How much longer could ABC Corp survive before the next breakthrough product was produced?

Natalia questioned, "As a Product Owner and someone who can strongly influence what a product looks like at launch, as well as its ultimate success, am I doing enough?"

Action
After the work Natalia and Ivan, the Product Manager, did to promote the use of a standard product lifecycle approach, they had continued to meet monthly. They developed an "emotional support team" and confided in each other. Their recent discussions had focused on what a Product Owner could do to increase the chances of creating a successful product.

Their research led to an expanded view of POA which Natalia agreed to ‘test drive’ on her very next initiative.\

Outcomes
Partway through that initiative, Natalia found that:

Advocating for customers forced her to feel their pain, their challenges, and their aspirations. This emotional connection gave the team a more intimate understanding of customer needs.
Championing the team's work allowed her to engage key stakeholders and the team for greater support for the work they were doing.
Designing for impact forced the team to connect with customers' emotional needs when working through product design elements.
Delivering smaller product increments allowed the team to be more thoughtful about what to create, with the goal of building something small that could be placed in front of a customer for feedback.
Encouraging everyone to constantly learn about anything that could impact the product being built allowed the team to make more effective decisions about what to build next.
Having a laser-like focus on creating value forced the team to routinely ask: "Are we creating the highest value feature we can deliver for our customers right now?"

Natalia concluded that collectively, these practices allowed her to effectively contribute as a Product Owner, and helped the team:

Build a higher value product,
Aligned with what customers needed, and
Build faster.

Lessons Learned
The need to create products that stand out and capture attention has increased with the confluence of:

An intensely competitive environment,
Greater customer expectations, and
Innovative new technology.

Product Owners can significantly influence the products that are launched. Using the POA Framework, and the expanded view of the Product Owner role provides you with the ability to create their next breakthrough product.