Cross-Product Initiative Ownership

Many organizations tackling cross-product initiatives struggle with initiative ownership. At its heart, a cross-product initiative has significant impact across multiple products or groups, sometimes called a portfolio. These are often complex efforts aimed at solving an expensive problem or opening a lucrative door. In other words, they are strategic bets.

Even organizations with a strong product culture are tempted to use classic program management for these initiatives. That usually means tracking committed scope instead of steering toward outcomes, control instead of aligned autonomy, change control instead of collaboration, and a growing mismatch between how initiatives are managed and how product teams actually work.

That style of management is not appropriate for this kind of complexity. In a product-oriented operating system, we treat these initiatives in many ways like products, including assigning product ownership accountability to them in the form of initiative ownership.

The point is not to call someone an Initiative Owner or Epic Owner. The value comes from them acting like one.

Product-oriented initiative owners:

• Act as a visionary for the strategic initiative
• Own the outcomes
• Connect to customers
• Collaborate with many teams to find creative ways to test and deliver outcomes
• Make critical decisions and decentralize decisions where possible
• Provide clarity and context
• Focus on risks and uncertainties
• Create discovery and delivery plans with plenty of opportunities to inspect, adapt, or stop
• Use influence to drive collaboration toward outcomes across products and departments

You might say they act like Professional Product Owners at the portfolio level. If you are looking for ways to bring product orientation to portfolio work, see the Portfolio Agility Trail Map.