For successful product delivery, a high-performance team is needed with individuals in the team having complementary capabilities. The team structure, roles and responsibilities, and competencies are important in creating a shared vision of the product. Product teams combined knowledge and capabilities drive many aspects of product development (for example, how fast the product features can be built, and whether the team has the capability to build certain features or requirements).

How the product teams operate within the context of the enterprise is determined by:

• Culture,
• Human resources,
• Brand value,
• Methodologies and
• Know-how, etc.

How POA Helps Capability Assessment

The Product Owner is responsible for the success of the product team, so the team can deliver value in the best way possible. POA helps the Practitioners support the team by:

• Imparting product and domain context,
• Analyzing product team recommendation, and
• Influencing resourcing processes to uplift the team's capability and maturity.

POA Techniques for Capability Assessment

BABOK® Guide Techniques

• Business Capability Analysis: Provide a framework for understanding the enterprise capabilities.
• Organizational Modelling: Describe the roles, responsibilities, and reporting structures that exist within an organization that helps steer the product in the correct direction.
• Roles and Permissions Matrix: Track specialized capabilities of the team to understand who can provide specific insights or contributions.

Case Study: Capability Assessment - Telecommunications

Background A mid-sized telecom player, Loop Networks, was considering a new initiative to create customer engagement and generate more revenue. One of the Product Owners, Jafari, thought of an ingenious product that would be available through the mobile platform of the telecom provider. He envisioned that this product would latch on to the mobile application for the telecom provider, and that when the customers used the application to review voice and data plans or pay bills, there would be offers presented to them in categories such as Leisure, Lifestyle, Electronics, Travel, and Fashion. He anticipated that it would improve partner collaboration and generate revenue through different offers. Challenge The product leadership liked the idea but pointed out that there may be issues concerning experts and the partners in the suggested field to craft offers that are valuable for the customers. They also made it clear that if the product were to go live, it should be completed before the new 5G infrastructure update programs went live in 10 months. This prompted Jafari to seriously think about the feasibility of the idea. Action Being a seasoned POA Practitioner Jafari knew he was facing multiple challenges in delivering a working product with the idea. But also, he knew that it was an opportunity that complemented the 5G infrastructure roll- out. He saw the challenges that needed to be addressed: Understanding the enterprise's capability of partnering with different providers to craft offers, and the capability of partners to deliver a seamless experience at their end. Standing up a product team with necessary cross-functional capabilities. Understanding the schedule pressure and de-risking the product delivery before the 5G infrastructure roll-out. Jafari dived into a detailed exercise of enterprise capability assessment and started assessing the skills required by the product team to execute the given scope of the product. Outcome After a thorough examination of enterprise capabilities, Jafari discovered that closing partnerships with a different organization in all the fields would require significant groundwork that might take the better part of the year. Jafari started contemplating partnership in entertainment and leisure. He reasoned that more users are likely to consume media and entertainment content on mobile, hence it had a high chance of upselling capabilities. He considered some of the OTT providers as a partner as they may have a lesser risk since they would already have some technology platform ready to be integrated. Jafari created a roles and responsibility log for different cross-functional roles in the organization so that internal and external hiring may become smoother. For the execution methodology, Jafari considered Agile Scrum as the preferred approach to build something high value upfront. Lessons Learned This scenario underlines the importance of assessing different types of capabilities in product development. To develop a product from just an idea to a working product requires convergence of enterprise, partners, and the product teams' capabilities. The PO needs to carefully manage the expectations through capability assessments that reveal what is feasible and what is not given different constraints. Also, when there are a lot of unknowns with respect to functionality and capabilities, an iterative approach is beneficial to reduce the risk of failure.

Process optimization in the context of product development entails the ability to:

• Streamline methodologies,
• Frameworks,
• Governance parameters, and
• Internal and external controls.

In an iterative process, there will be changes to the delivery process over the life of the product. The Product Owner needs to be capable of adjusting to changes which affect the planning and delivery of the product to customers.

How POA Helps Process Optimization

Expected and unexpected changes occur during product development.

For example, resources and capacity may be scarce from release to release or internal organizational processes may affect the delivery of the product. The Product Owner must:

• Anticipate and accept the changes,
• Optimize:
  • Product strategy,
  • Roadmap, and
  • Backlog to react to any changes quickly.

The Product Owner must assess every change from a value perspective so that maximum value can be delivered despite the changes.

POA Techniques for Process Optimization

Agile Extension Techniques

• Retrospectives: Reflect on learnings to continuously improve and optimize the value delivery process.

BABOK® Guide Techniques

• Process Analysis: Assesses product delivery processes and frameworks for their efficiency and effectiveness, as well as their ability to identify opportunities for change/improvements.
• Organizational Modelling: Describe the roles, responsibilities, and reporting structures that exist within an organization that help the team understand the adaptability of product delivery frameworks.
• Risk Analysis and Management: Identify and formulate mitigations for an optimized process.

Other Techniques

• Capacity Planning: Ensure that the right resources and people are available and allocated to specific tasks so that product value delivery is optimized.

Case Study: Process Optimization - Telecommunications

Background The product development was well underway for Loop Networks with a strategy to partner with an OTT provider and offer postpaid and data plans with discounted entertainment packages. This set of features were provided with the telecom provider's mobile application. Challenge The marketing team and the OTT partner designed many such offers but they needed a faster way to test the response by taking the offers into the market more frequently. There were other configuration changes that needed to happen in the background for subscribers' base plans as well as when the subscribers could opt-in for any offer. There was a very clear need to be fast in learning so that the right offers could be tailored. Action The Product Owner, Jafari, reviewed the current iteration and release process for the features to reach the customers. Jafari concluded from a detailed process analysis that the launch of any new offer into the market was quite similar. For example, the offer is designed and then pushed to a specific set of target customers, but there is a delay by repeating tasks. Jafari suggested that a disciplined agile process be followed, with an integrated DevOps pipeline. Secondly, Jafari suggested that the few product metrics needed to be tracked upfront. He also suggested that Customer Effort Score (CES) and Bounce Rate for the feature to be tracked and displayed to the product team on a live dashboard. Outcome Integrating the DevOps pipeline allowed for quick deployment of the offers and different campaigns. At the same time, the metrics dashboard provided direction for customer reaction to the offers. It allowed the team to quickly deploy and roll back changes and learn from them. Lessons Learned Being quick to market and learning fast is a large part of delivering value to the customers speedily. In this scenario, Jafari assessed and optimized the delivery process to achieve quicker results. Using a framework such as DevOps allowed smaller deployments and faster rollback, which is well- suited to launch campaigns involving offers.

Support tools and technologies have advanced a great deal for managing products and supporting environments. Teams can provide maximum value when focusing on customers and business value much more effectively by using automated tools. The use of technology is more effective in supporting processes and procedures.

How POA Helps Leverage Technology

The Product Owner is involved in many operational decision-making processes where the value provided is secondary and time-consuming. Utilizing technology to improve the Product Owner's and product team's efficiency creates a faster turnaround.

For example, many planning, communication and collaboration tools exist for product development, which help Product Owners to complete their work effectively. For an evidence-and-data-driven approach to product development, POs can use new tools in:

• Data analysis,
• Reporting,
• Metrics tracking, and
• Dashboarding tools.

POA Techniques to Leverage Technology

Using technology accelerates the techniques. The primary categories of technologies may include:

• Planning and management tools,
• Roadmapping and visioning tools,
• Requirements management tools, and
• Collaboration, sharing and communication tools.

Case Study: Leverage Technology - Telecommunications

Background The offers feature for the Loop Networks on their mobile platform has reached a steady state. Loop networks have planned to adopt different types of offers from other partners in Lifestyle, Sports, and F&B areas. In addition, Loop Network wanted to go global with this release with a localized instance of the mobile application. Challenge With the new expansion plan for the product, Product Owner, Jafari, was overwhelmed with the sheer number of moving pieces and complexities. Also, the pandemic of 2020 and the rise of a remote working culture prevented Jafari from facilitating easy collaboration among teams across the globe. Action Jafari decided that the only way he could keep a tab on the entire product effort and the expansion plan from loop networks was by utilizing technology and available accelerators effectively. He analyzed and categorized the POA and execution tasks and conducted a vendor and tool assessment for different technology solutions available in the market. He was guided by the recommendation from the PMO regarding different frameworks and standardized templates. He requisitioned software for: Product planning, Road mapping, Backlog management, Iteration and release management, DevOps tech stack, and Version management. To effectively work across teams globally he started using conferencing and collaboration tools and promoted remote collaboration best practices. Outcome With many of the repeatable tasks now automated with integrated analytics and systems view of the product across geographies and separate planning options for different teams, Jafari adopted a Scrum-of- Scrums to scale product activities. This resulted in the right level of information and collaboration across product teams. Lessons Learned Complementary technology products really help teams by automating different types of tasks so that the entire team can focus on adding value rather than spending additional efforts planning, tracking, collaborating, and communicating. Using standardized templates, and accelerators built into these software products allows teams to act fast.