Product Ownership: The Product Leader's Bind
When product managers aren't excited to take on product ownership, that's a sniff test for team topology — and a signal to reshape component-oriented teams.
Meet Alice. Alice is the CPO at BuzzCorp. As BuzzCorp tries to move from “Agile Theater” to product-oriented agility, Alice is trying to figure out the appropriate structure for the Product organization.
Beyond the Product Managers in her group, BuzzCorp also has about three times as many Product Owners working closely with its Agile Teams, which are mostly oriented around systems, components, and layers of the BuzzCorp technology stack.
Alice sees the Product Managers as driving strategy. But she also wants them to be engaged in continuous discovery, development, and validation loops to bring their strategic vision to reality.
Product managers SHOULD take on the responsibility of product ownership for their product.
Whether they’re excited to do so is an excellent sniff test for whether your team topology is product-oriented
Alice and her team aren’t very excited to take on the product ownership role with the way the teams are currently structured. Sniff test - it smells…
How do we help Alice and her team out of this bind?
Reshaping the team topology
Alice will need to work with technology/engineering/IT leadership to develop a product topology based mainly on empowered product teams.
This often means shuffling teams from systems/components to product-oriented teams.
Other patterns include identifying an internal platform and considering it a product, with the appropriate empowered product team and ownership that ensues.
In other cases, the Product is quite big - and it’s unclear how to split it into sub-products each with its own empowered decoupled product team.
While not trivial, that is a crucial exercise to explore. (If you’re interested in my spending time on some techniques for slicing products reply SLICE…)
A pragmatic middle ground
As a pragmatic compromise, Alice can organize the groups working on these larger monolithic products into stream-aligned teams (also known as Feature Teams) that can deliver a feature on this product but don’t necessarily own the end-to-end product lifecycle/outcomes.
Each of these teams would be empowered to hit a certain objective/goal out of the park by exploring what features are needed and trying different approaches until they achieve the objective (or go back to the Product level with a suggestion to reconsider the goal).
Even though they don’t own a product, Alice realizes that these teams will benefit from having a product management professional working closely with them and providing product ownership guidance and direction to the team. She decides that this is an excellent opportunity for junior product managers in the product organization.
So…
What does your team topology look like? Is it product-oriented? A good question to ask is whether a real Product professional would thrive if they took on the product ownership role for each of the teams. How could you tweak the topology to make it more Product-oriented? What would need to be true for that new topology to work? What does the runway towards making it real look like?
The 15% intervention
What is the 15% small intervention you can try to drive, as a Product Leader, to create more empowerment in a few more areas of your product organization?
Designing and evolving a product operating model is one of the highest-leverage things a product leader can do. Explore Product Operating Model advisory or let’s talk.
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