Accelerating and Scaling Digital Products in Times of Change

Co-authored with Milorad Stefanovic

An innovative and well designed product aligned with customer needs has always been at the very heart of any successful digital strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an opportunity to discover and address customers’ new and unmet needs. With the pandemic likely changing customer behaviours for decades to come, we believe digital-first organizations with the agile mindset at scale will thrive in the new and changing environment. 

Oftentimes, growth and sustained success are powered by a portfolio of interconnected products delivering a differentiated value proposition and a seamless end-to-end experience. In this context, Product Owner is a critical role that needs to scale with the agile way of working. However, putting together a wish-list for a “perfect” Product Owner may feel like describing a unicorn. One-size-fits-all is not an option, with a wide range of PO characteristics dependent on the nature of the product, its maturity, and complexity.

Therefore, we see the ability to scale the Product Owner role and position it for long-term success is important and this time we wanted to share some of our experience in this space.

Finding “the right” Product Owner

So, what makes that list we mentioned for the perfect product owner? First, she would be a great champion for the user - ideally someone who has walked a mile in their shoes. The next item on the list would be a strategic mindset, i.e. an in-depth understanding of the product and a vision for it over time. The person would also be empowered to make important decisions daily, including difficult trade-offs. A large portion of their time would be dedicated to direct interaction with agile team and individual team members. The list goes on and includes customer centricity, storytelling, effective delegation, conflict resolution, etc. Lowell Lindstrom outlines some fundamental skills and attitudes in an article on Scrum Alliance. 

Your list may be slightly different. Nevertheless, we are sure you will agree finding the right person is a tall order. However, this is an important first step. There is strong evidence that one of the most important criteria for success for digital products and agile teams is carefully selecting the right type of Product Owners. Therefore, the time and due diligence dedicated to the selection of a product owner is a worthwhile investment.

Positioning Product Owners for Success

Once the product owner has been selected, he or she will need help and support. Positioning the PO for success and growth includes a range of activities from training to ongoing coaching.

A good starting point is building your “Product Owner 101” curriculum. PO 101 should include an overview of the Agile way of working, addressing both “the why” and “the how” questions. We had a positive experience delivering this curriculum through a balanced mix of interactive sessions and self-paced online material, e.g. Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell by Henrik Kniberg. In addition to the PO, we also believe the leader / manager the PO works with should also develop an understanding of the agile way of working through a similar approach.

This is also a good time to discuss time commitment and related expectations as an important element of the overall model. In the last State of Agile Report, 36% teams highlighted lack of business/customer/product owner availability as a Top 10 challenge experienced when adopting and scaling agile. Lot of new Product Owners look at the role as a secondary responsibility to their “day job.” Instead, this should be THE job for Product Owners to dedicate themselves to and set the foundation for scaling the role.

In addition to initial training, the ongoing and proactive coaching is also important. The coaching approach for our team is designed to leverage and enforce partnership between the product owner and the scrum master. An experienced coach is able to help these two roles maximize the value of their partnership.

Finally, we strongly believe product owners can and should help and support each other too. With our teams, we have created a community of practice and continuous learning programs to enable this approach so PO’s can share tactics and approaches in a peer group or one on one.

Scaling the Product Owner role

So… you have a product owner and you have provided him or her with the required support. Great - You are done! Right? 

It depends. Without a doubt, having a strong and well supported PO is great. It is an important milestone on your digital and agile journey. Having said that, the complexity of the product or perhaps a portfolio of several products may require the role of a PO to scale beyond a single individual. And there are multiple scenarios and strategies in doing so. How to Scale the Scrum Product Owner 

The approach may be based on more granular products, specific features, product versions and variants, strategic roadmap and time horizons etc. The optimal approach will involve a careful evaluation of the pros and cons and will depend on your specific circumstances - including the lifecycle of your product and the maturity of your team. You should also consider testing out and applying multiple scaling techniques over time.

Regardless of the scaling technique you use, it is important to ensure an effective placement of the scaled PO role within the larger governance model within your organization. In our case, we decided to go in the direction of a Chief Product Owner and a portfolio of POs. 

This technique was especially suited for us because our products have entered the maturity stage in the product life cycle. Our digital portfolio largely focuses on satisfying the existing client base and maximizing business benefits. Although we are attracting new advisors and clients, we are at a place where bigger changes are less likely to occur, like expanding to a new market or customer base. Therefore, for us, splitting the strategic and tactical product development made the most sense. 

With this approach, we are ensuring that strategic insights, customer feedback and high level roadmaps are discussed regularly amongst the Chief Product Owner and other Product Owners. Although stakeholder management is every Product Owner’s responsibility, it falls more so on the Chief Product Owner, while the tactical Product Owners focus on breaking down strategic items into their respective product backlogs. One of the benefits we see with this approach is that the Chief Product Owner enables an end-to-end experience considering the client and advisor experiences as part of the larger strategic roadmap. This was not as transparent before we scaled our Product Owner roles. For example, one of the commitments our Product Owners have made is to achieve parity in making the same information visible to both our clients and advisors. Therefore, while our advisors are serving our clients, they are able to focus on the client’s immediate needs, rather than asking for information the client has shared with us already. The additional benefit we are seeing is that the various lines of businesses are banding together on prioritizing such items across products. We expect this will simplify our financial planning and make it more flexible.

Tell us what you think about the Product Owner role and we would love to hear from you on your experiences with scaling the role.