Product Management

This person is a needle in a haystack. An almost impossible combination of structured thinker and visionary leader.

-Tony Fadell, Build [1]

Definition: 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.

What is the role of Product Management?

Product Management is the function responsible for defining desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions that meet customer needs. They lead product innovation across the ART. Product Managers usually fulfill this function. They often have backgrounds in the organization’s business, emerging technologies, product design, and market research. More than one Product Manager may be needed for a single ART, which happens often when an ART contains multiple products or complex systems.

The journey from an idea to delivering business value to a customer is complex. There must be active coordination and communication across an organization. Product Managers play a key role in this process. Product Managers form relationships across the organization and with customers. These connections help them have a deep understanding of market forces and customer desires. They advocate for the customer within the organization, ensuring that customer needs are met while delivering profitable products.

Product Management, System Architects, Business Owners, and the Release Train Engineer (RTE) guide the ART toward successful outcomes. Together, they form an essential ART leadership team that maintains alignment between product strategy and implementation.

Each Product Manager is fluent in business needs, customers, and product development abilities. Product Managers synthesize the best solutions by understanding the intersection of these perspectives, maximizing value for all stakeholders. They are organized thinkers and inspirational guides. Product Managers work with the System Architect and RTE to ensure they understand the technical impact of their decisions and understand the capabilities of the Agile Teams to deliver on their vision.

The ART turns this product strategy into reality. The Agile Teams develop, deliver, and continuously improve the solutions they build. The alignment of ART Product Managers with the Agile Teams is key. Together, they ensure customers are getting the most meaningful business value. The teams, their Product Owners, and the Product Managers have open, frequent, collaborative communication, each bringing their unique strengths and information.

Product Managers play a pivotal role in keeping Product Owners informed about the latest market trends, product insights, and customer feedback. This equips them to manage daily decisions and effectively prioritize the team’s backlog, facilitating a smooth and efficient product development process.

What are the responsibilities of Product Management?

Product Management’s responsibilities in SAFe fall into five main areas, as shown in Figure 1. The sections that follow describe each area.

Each area of responsibility is described below, followed by additional guidance for ensuring that the function of Product Management delivers maximum value to customers and the organization. 

Exploring Markets and Users

Product Managers continuously explore the solution context, gathering insights about the market and potential customers, developing the product strategy, and defining the hypotheses to test it. In addition to the Agile Teams themselves, many roles support Product Managers. The roles involved vary depending on the product. Common examples are people who specialize in user experience design, market strategy, and customer success. Product Managers take different views into account as they explore. These include the needs of the customer who buys the product and of the user who uses the product. Additionally, they look at potential markets, which are groups of people who could potentially become customers or users of a product.

• Conduct primary and secondary research – Primary research data is about finding out if a product fits well with specific uses or needs. It answers detailed questions like, “Will this feature be useful for our target users in their day-to-day?” Secondary research data, on the other hand, looks at bigger trends in the marketplace, giving insights into what’s happening across larger groups of people. Both types of data are important to Product Managers. They help guide not just the strategy decisions but also the specific choices in how a product is designed. To get this information, teams gather and study both internal data (like user feedback) and external data (like market reports).
• Apply market segmentation – Not all users are the same. They have different challenges, desire different features, and value products differently at different times. Product Managers divide the user population into segments based on common characteristics and define solutions for the most appealing segments.
• Identify market rhythms and events – Market rhythms are predictable patterns such as seasons, quarterly earning cycles, or annual holiday spikes in shopping. They affect supply and demand, guiding the schedule of product releases. Additionally, market events like geopolitical events, product recalls, and competitor launches happen with little notice. These events may require Product Managers to prepare for dynamic releases outside the regular cycle.
• Understand user needs – Ensuring that solutions deliver maximum business benefit requires a deep understanding of end-user needs. Product Management methods like lean UX, human-centered design (HCD), and journey mapping. These techniques help improve the product’s direction by keeping up with changing needs.

Connecting with the Customer

Product Managers engage directly with customers throughout product development. This helps ensure that the customer’s needs are integrated into product strategy from the beginning. Product Managers also help ensure that these needs continue to be reflected in released solutions as they evolve over time.

• 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. Supported by the tools and techniques of design thinking, this mindset focuses the entire organization on creating desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions.
• Empathize with the customer – Solutions must deliver value from the customer’s perspective. This requires product organizations to build that value into the design of each solution. Product Managers leads the way by utilizing personas, empathy interviews, empathy maps, and related tools to capture and communicate customer wants and needs.
• Apply design thinking. Design Thinking is a holistic, iterative approach that ensures solutions are desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable throughout the product life cycle. Product Management uses design thinking practices and tools, which enable a full understanding of the problems and designing the best solutions to address them.
• Involve the customer continuously – Product Managers frequently involve customers in continuous exploration activities, PI Planning, and System Demos. This supports the feedback loops that products require to innovate successfully.

Defining Product Strategy, Vision, and Roadmaps

Product Managers play an integral role in bridging portfolio strategy and ART execution. Customer needs must be translated into features that can be delivered by Agile Teams to achieve measurable business outcomes.

• Encourage product innovation – Product Managers promote new ideas and work with Agile Teams to develop those ideas. Product Managers set aside funding, infrastructure and time for trying out new things. They encourage Agile Teams to make prototypes and get quick, real results. Product Managers provide data and feedback from their research to the Agile Team. This helps the teams identify and trial new ideas.
• Align strategy to business objectives – Product Managers are responsible for aligning the product strategy, vision, and roadmap to the portfolio’s strategic themes. They also must align within the budget and guardrails of the value stream they are a part of.
• Establish value exchange models – Product Managers exemplify SAFe principle #1 – Take an economic view. Product Management uses their expertise to identify what customers want from a product and what the organization needs in return. When both sides get good value, everyone wins.
• Create and communicate a compelling vision – Product Managers continuously refine and communicate the product vision to the ART. During each PI Planning event, they present the vision, highlighting prioritized features and relevant milestones. When a Product Manager takes on the role of Epic Owner, they also create and oversee the lean business case for the epic.
• Manage flexible roadmaps – Product Managers ensure plans and milestones are aligned with roadmaps. These help Agile Teams and stakeholders understand and agree on what priority and sequence are needed to maximize the value delivered. Product Managers maintain and update these roadmaps as business and customer needs evolve.

Managing and Prioritizing the ART Backlog

Product Managers support the flow of work through the ART backlog, ensuring that it always reflects customers’ most current needs.

• Guide feature creation – Product Managers lead the creation of features that fulfill customer needs and can be delivered within a single PI. They also ensure that features in the ART backlog contain clear benefit hypotheses and acceptance criteria.
• Prioritize features—For the ART, identifying and sequencing features wisely is crucial for maximizing business value. Therefore, Product Managers ensure the ART backlog is always prioritized. In addition, Product Managers collaborate with POs, Business Owners, System Architects, and others to ensure the backlog has a healthy mix of enabler and business features.
• Accept features – Acting on the customer’s behalf, Product Managers evaluate the completeness of features implemented through the ART backlog. This final check examines a feature’s implementation against its acceptance criteria and determines whether it contains enough business value to be released.
• Support Architectural Runway—Product Managers do not drive technological decisions alone. They partner with the system architect to support the ongoing development and maintenance of the Architectural Runway. The System Architect and the Product Managers negotiate the available capacity to balance business and enabler features in the ART backlog.
• Participate in ART events – Product Managers play a significant role in PI Planning, Inspect and Adapt, biweekly System Demos, Solution Demos, and PI System Demos. They share knowledge, collect feedback, and address product-related issues. They ensure the Product Owners and Scrum Masters/Team Coaches of the ART have the context they need to make decentralized daily decisions. The events provide a cadence for Product Management to learn the current state of the PI, including customer data and research spikes that the team has been implementing.

Delivering Value

Product Managers leverage the Continuous Delivery Pipeline to release value connected to market needs. Depending on the context, this could mean releasing multiple times per day, weekly, monthly, or whenever customer needs are in balance with the goals of the organization.

• Release value on-demand – Product managers support a modern and speedy continuous delivery pipeline. With proper investment, solution deployment becomes decoupled from release activities. Product Managers use this ability to release when the timing is optimal for the business. They work with the System Architect and the Agile Teams to ensure the value is integrated fully across teams and that the right NFRs are released as needed.
• Ensure product completeness – Product managers ensure that solutions meet a wide range of customer needs. ‘Whole solutions’ are designed from the customer’s perspective and comprise multiple features that deliver complete, engaging end-user experiences.
• Enable operations – Product Managers support and enable the operational roles that ensure customers and users realize every release’s full value. They help marketing, sales, customer success, and compliance prepare product launches.
• Measure business value – A viable solution creates more value to the organization than it costs. Costs are relatively straightforward to measure, but value is often less easy to quantify. Each organization assesses value differently. Product Managers work with other business leaders to define the value of solutions within the organization’s context.  They then measure the value to ensure business goals are achieved.
• Coordinate customer solutions – Product Managers often collaborate across ARTs to develop a customer solution composed of many products. This is especially common in the development of large solutions.

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References

[1] Fadell, Tony. Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Harper Business, 2022.