Product Management

Product management advocates for the customer business. Product management has to understand, communicate and ensure success from the standpoint of the economic customer requesting the solution.

Product Owner

About
The product owner is the empowered central point of product leadership. The primary voice of the stakeholder community. The product owner defines what to do and what order to do it. The principal responsibilities of the Product Owner include: participating in planning activities, grooming the product backlog, defining acceptance criteria and verifying they are met through product reviews, and collaborating with the development team.
Key Responsibility Areas
  1. Work with the customer(s) to define the overall vision, scope, and priorities for the product. A product owner should understand their product’s current functionality and the need(s) it fulfills in order to better determine gaps and help solve their customer’s challenges and needs. Manage customer expectations about the product team’s ability to meet these needs given the current constraints.
  2. Clearly communicate the customer’s needs to the product team to ensure everyone has a common understanding. To that end, learn, practice, and be able to deliver succinct, hands-on overviews of your project(s) most relevant capabilities and enterprise integration points so that the product team can easily understand its current capabilities, how they need to change or be enhanced, and why.
  3. Write, refine, and prioritize requirements by starting with the high-level business needs and decomposing those into logical units of work with clear goals and acceptance criteria to ensure domain business rules and customer needs are clearly communicated to product team for successful execution.
  4. Identify, analyze, and communicate customer-driven changes to successfully adapt to shifting customer priorities and needs.
  5. Define release goals for delivering the product to the customer. This includes setting the development priorities (stack order the Release Backlog) required to meet those goals to ensure product team is focused on the most relevant customer needs and will deliver value to the customer in accordance with their expectations.
Links

Subject Matter Expert

About
The subject matter expert (SME) is an expert in a particular area or topic.
Key Responsibility Areas
  1. Works with the Product Owner to define the overall vision, scope, and priorities for the product along with the current functionality and the need(s) it fulfills to better determine gaps and help solve the customer’s challenges and needs.
  2. Provides expert knowledge and details on the subject.
  3. Provides industry or subject specific context for what insights are identified by the algorithms and what models mean.
  4. Provides context to interpret and analyze data on the subject.
  5. Gives insight into how data is collected so a Data Scientist can see the impact that will have on analysis.
  6. When relationships have been found within the data, the SME can inform on why those relationships might exist or inform on underlying variables that could be influencing the outcome.
Links

Business Analyst

About
The business analyst function is to collaborate with sponsors, subject matter experts, product owners, and user experience architects to analyze and define the business needs as outlined in the vision statement for the project. The business analyst will work on defining requirements and acting as a proxy for the users and customers.
Key Responsibility Areas
  1. Work with the Product Owner to define the overall vision, scope, and priorities for the product along with the current functionality and the need(s) it fulfills to better determine gaps and help solve the customer’s challenges and needs.
  2. Clearly communicate the customer’s needs to the product team to ensure everyone has a common understanding for upcoming increments of work.
  3. Write, and refine requirements by starting with the high-level business needs and decomposing those into logical units of work with clear goals and acceptance criteria to ensure domain business rules and customer needs are clearly communicated to product team for successful execution.
  4. Identify, analyze, and communicate customer-driven changes to successfully adapt to shifting customer priorities and needs.
Links

Process Guidance Version: 10.4