In my recent project charter series, I said we need a product vision to drive the project charter effort so the customers can get this container of value. Who creates that product vision? The product leader.
However, too many supposedly agile teams lack an effective product leader. Here's what I've seen:
- A part-time product manager trying to fulfill product management for several products or several, often unrelated teams.
- A business analyst who does not have access to the strategic thinkers in the organization. That BA does not know enough about the product strategy and how it interacts with the corporate strategy. (The company set the BA up to fail.)
- A manager trying to lead and serve at least one team and the product. With that much multitasking, the manager often loses context.
Effective product leadership is a full-time strategic role. Product leaders discuss product strategy with the team, other organizational leaders, and the customers.
Worse, without effective product leadership, the backlog grows, often randomly. The roadmap does not fulfill the product strategy. And then the corporate strategy is at risk.
What can those teams and their organizations do? Instead of an insufficient solo person, they can create a product value team.
Have We Ever Had Enough Product Managers?
I've been in this industry for decades, and I don't think I've ever seen enough product managers. During the waterfall days, we tried to manage our way around that with PRDs or MRDs, Product Requirements Documents or Marketing Requirements Documents.
Those didn't work either. As a project or program manager, I had plenty of conversations that started a month into the work that started like this: “Where do you want this product to go? Please tell me because we have options.”
Besides, agility requires collaboration in many dimensions:
- Within the team, including the product leader.
- Across the organization, especially if this effort is part of a large product that requires program management.
- Between product strategy and portfolio management, especially if the organization wants business or organizational agility.
We have to stop thinking of a solo product leader and start thinking of a product value team. Effective product leaders already use a product value team, even if they don't call it that.
These teams can manage the lack of product leadership. Not perfectly, but better than an overworked product manager or someone who is not in the strategy discussions loop.
Experiment to Learn How Team-Based Product Leadership Might Work
In these posts, I'll share how my clients have changed some of their product leadership practices. We started with experiments because these people feel as if they cannot change their current state: too few product leaders or the “wrong” people in the role.
Some of these nice people do not know how to hire effective product managers. Others do not have the money to hire the people they need. Still others realized they don't have the right people—those people excel at tactics and do not yet have strategic experience. These clients are not about to fire people who are not quite ready for the strategic discussions.
Instead, I've asked them to experiment with different designs of product value teams. They've had more success than I imagined. I'll explain each of these, the pros and cons, in the following posts.
Instead of solo product leadership failure, consider these ideas for team-based product leadership. One of these might work for you.
The Product Value Team Series:
- How to Avoid Solo Product Leadership Failure with a Product Value Team, Part 1
- How a Vertical Product Value Team Shares Strategy and Tactics for One Product, Part 2, to “share” information more widely.
- The Cross-Functional Product Value Team, Part 3, to incorporate information from across the organization.
- The Program Product Value Team, Part 4, to shepherd the business value of the entire product.
(As I write these posts, I will fix the titles here.)