Rewired

Chapter 15Professionalize product management

Getting good players is easy. Getting them to play together is the hard part.

—Casey Stengel

While implementing an agile operating model requires companies to develop multiple capabilities (as described in Chapters 13 and 14), two deserve a closer look because of their importance: product management and customer experience design (which is tackled in Chapter 16). A crucial difference between many tech companies and their peers in other sectors is the degree to which they have embedded these capabilities – along with a software engineering culture and use of data and analytics – into how they work.

Building product management depth is usually one of the core reskilling goals in a digital and AI transformation. There are two primary roles: the product owner, who leads pods, and the senior product owner, who leads a group of pods or a domain. Product owners are absolutely indispensable because they combine crucial operational and strategic skills, including: understanding business needs, having an intense understanding of the customer, and having a solid grounding in technology (see Exhibit 15.1).

EXHIBIT 15.1

Many have described this role as a “mini-CEO” in terms of the breadth of responsibilities and skills required. For this reason, product management is quickly becoming the new spot for top business talent rotations, and ...