Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop
Strengthen product management in your organization through effective executive leadership by focusing product teams on core capabilities and proper alignment.
- You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.
- IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This conflicts with product delivery, which continuously delivers value over the lifetime of a product.
- Delivering multiple products together creates additional challenges because each product has its own pedigree, history, and goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Empowered product managers and product owners are the key to ensuring your delivery teams are delivering the right value at the right time to the right stakeholders.
- Establishing operationally aligned product families helps bridge the gap between enterprise priorities and product enhancements.
- Leadership must be aligned to empower and support Agile values and product teams to unlock the full value realization within your organization.
Impact and Result
- Common understanding of product management and Agile delivery.
- Commitment to support and empower product teams.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
7.3/10
Overall Impact
$32,564
Average $ Saved
20
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Waterloo Region District School Board
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
N/A
Hans was very flexible in the approach we want to take and was willing to engage in the discussion. He has a good grasp of the agile approach we w... Read More
TAB Bank
Workshop
8/10
$64,999
20
The best part was the access to the knowledge from Hans and the team. The ease of which suggested material was referenced, made available and share... Read More
The City Of Columbus
Workshop
4/10
N/A
N/A
The best parts were the guided conversations with our staff. The worst part was that the final deliverable provided only offered a single insight, ... Read More
Workshop: Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Understanding Your Top Challenges
The Purpose
Understand the drivers for your product transformation.
Key Benefits Achieved
Define the drivers for your transition to product-centric delivery.
Activities
Outputs
What is driving your organization to become product focused?
- List of challenges and drivers
Module 2: Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
The Purpose
Understand the product transformation journey and differences.
Key Benefits Achieved
Identify the cultural, behavioral, and leadership changes needed for a successful transformation.
Activities
Outputs
Define the differences between projects and product delivery
- List of differences
Module 3: Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
The Purpose
Understand why smaller iterations increase value realization and decrease accumulated risk.
Key Benefits Achieved
Leverage smaller iterations to reduce time to value and accumulated risk to core operations.
Activities
Outputs
What is business agility?
- Common understanding about the value of smaller iterations
Module 4: Defining Products and Product Management in Your Context
The Purpose
Establish an organizational starting definition of products.
Key Benefits Achieved
Tailor product management to meet the needs and vision of your organization.
Activities
Outputs
What is a product? Who are your consumers?
- Product definition
Identify enablers and blockers of product ownership
- List of enablers and blockers of product ownership
Define a set of guiding principles for product management
- Set of guiding principles for product management
Module 5: Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
The Purpose
Understand the relationship between product management and product delivery.
Key Benefits Achieved
Optimize product management to prioritize the right changes for the right people at the right time.
Activities
Outputs
Discussions
- Common understanding
Module 6: Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
The Purpose
Personalize and commit to supporting product teams.
Key Benefits Achieved
Embrace leadership and cultural changes needed to empower and support teams.
Activities
Outputs
Your management culture
- Your management culture map
Personal Cultural Stop, Start, and Continue
- Personal Cultural Stop, Start, and Continue list
Now, Next, Later to support product owners
- Now, Next, Later roadmap
Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop
Strengthen product management in your organization through effective executive leadership by focusing on product teams, core capabilities, and proper alignment.
Objective of this workshop
To develop a common understanding and foundation for product management so we, as leaders, better understand how to lead product owners, product managers, and their teams.
Enable Product Delivery - Executive Leadership Workshop
Learn how enterprise agility can provide lasting value to the organization
Clarify your role in supporting your teams to deliver lasting value to stakeholders and customers
- Understanding Your Top Challenges
- Define your challenges, goals, and opportunities Agile and product management will impact.
- Transitioning from Projects to Product-centric Delivery
- Understand the shift from fixed delivery to continuous improvement and delivery of value.
- Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
- Organizations need to embrace change and leverage smaller delivery cycles.
- Defining Your "Products" and Product Management
- Define products in your culture and how to empower product delivery teams.
- Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
- Use product ownership to drive increased ROI into your product delivery teams and lifecycles.
- Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
- Define the actions and changes you must make for this transformation to be successful.
Your Product Transformation Journey
- Make the Case for Product Delivery
- Align your organization with the practices to deliver what matters most
- Enable Product Delivery – Executive Workshop
- One-day executive workshop – align and prepare your leadership
- Audience: Senior executives and IT leadership.
Size: 8-16 people
Time: 6 hours
- Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
- Enhance product backlogs, roadmapping, and strategic alignment
- Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
Size: 10-20 people
Time: 3-4 days
- Deliver Your Digital Products at Scale
- Scale Product Families to Align Enterprise Goals
- Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
Size: 10-20 people
Time: 3-4 days
- Mature and Scale Product Ownership
- Align and mature your product owners
- Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
Size: 8-16 people
Time: 2-4 days
Repeat workshops with different companies, operating units, departments, or teams as needed.
What is a workshop?
We WILL ENGAGE in discussions and activities:
- Flexible, to accommodate the needs of the group.
- Open forum for discussion and questions.
- Share your knowledge, expertise, and experiences (roadblocks and success stories).
- Everyone is part of the process.
- Builds upon itself.
This workshop will NOT be:
- A lecture or class.
- A monologue that never ends.
- Technical training.
- A presentation.
- Us making all the decisions.
Roles within the workshop
We each have a role to play to make our workshop successful!
Facilitators
- Introduce the best practice framework used by Info-Tech.
- Ask questions about processes, procedures, and assumptions.
- Guide for the methodology.
- Liaison for any other relevant Info-Tech research or services.
Participants
- Contribute and speak out as much as needed.
- Provide expertise on the current processes and technology.
- Ask questions.
- Provide feedback.
- Collaborate and work together to produce solutions.
Understanding Your Top Challenges
- Understanding Your Top Challenges
- Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
- Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
- Defining Your Products and Product Management
- Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
- Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
- Wrap-Up and Retrospective
Executive Summary
Your Challenge
- Products are the lifeblood of an organization. They deliver the capabilities needed to deliver value to customers, internal users, and stakeholders.
- The shift to becoming a product organization is intended to continually increase the value you provide to the broader organization as you grow and evolve.
- You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.
Common Obstacles
- IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This conflicts with product delivery, which continuously delivers value over the lifetime of a product.
- Delivering multiple products together creates additional challenges because each product has its own pedigree, history, and goals.
- Product owners struggle to prioritize changes to deliver product value. This creates a gap and conflict between product and enterprise goals.
Info-Tech's Approach
Info-Tech's approach will guide you through:
- Understanding the top challenges driving your product initiative.
- Improving your transitioning from projects to product-centric delivery.
- Enhancing enterprise agility and the value of change.
- Defining products and product management in your context.
- Connecting product management to Agile practices.
- Committing to empowering Agile Product teams.
What is driving your organization to become product focused?
30 minutes
- Team introductions:
- Share your name and role
- What are the key challenges you are looking to solve around product management?
- What blockers or challenges will we need to overcome?
Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.
Input
- Organizational knowledge
- Goals and challenges
Output
- List of key challenges
- List of workshop expectations
- Parking lot items
Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
- Understanding Your Top Challenges
- Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
- Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
- Defining Your Products and Product Management
- Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
- Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
- Wrap-Up and Retrospective
Define the differences between projects and product delivery
30 minutes
- Consider project delivery and product delivery.
- Discussion:
- What are some differences between the two?
Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.
Input
- Organizational knowledge
- Internal terms and definitions
Output
- List of differences between projects and product delivery
Define the differences between projects and product delivery
15 minutes
Project Delivery | vs | Product Delivery |
|---|---|---|
Point in time | What is changed | |
Method of funding changes | Needs an owner | |
Input
- Organizational knowledge
- Internal terms and definitions
Output
- List of differences between projects and product delivery
Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.
Identify the differences between a project-centric and a product-centric organization
Project | Product | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Fund Projects | Funding | → | Fund Products or Teams |
Line of Business Sponsor | Prioritization | → | Product Owner |
Makes Specific Changes | Product Management | → | Improve Product Maturity |
Assign People to Work | Work Allocation | → | Assign Work |
Project Manager Manages | Capacity Management | → | Team Manages Capacity |
Info-Tech Insight
Product delivery requires significant shifts in the way you complete development work and deliver value to your users. Make the changes that support improving end user value and enterprise alignment.
Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements
Projects within products
Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a "product-based" or "project-based" shop, the same basic principles should apply.
You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.
You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.
While Agile and product are intertwined, they are not the same!
Delivering products does not necessarily require an Agile mindset. However, Agile methods help facilitate the journey because product thinking is baked into them.
Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy
In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.
Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?"
Info-Tech Insight
The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Talk to an Analyst
Our analyst calls are focused on helping our members use the research we produce, and our experts will guide you to successful project completion.
Book an Analyst Call on This Topic
You can start as early as tomorrow morning. Our analysts will explain the process during your first call.
Get Advice From a Subject Matter Expert
Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your project, interpret and analyze the results of each project step, and set the direction for your next project step.
Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- Emily Archer, Lead Business Analyst, Enterprise Consulting, authentic digital agency
- David Berg, Founder & CTO, Strainprint Technologies Inc.
- Kathy Borneman, Digital Product Owner, SunTrust Bank
- Charlie Campbell, Product Owner, Merchant e-Solutions
- Yarrow Diamond, Sr. Director, Business Architecture, Financial Services
- Cari J. Faanes-Blakey, CBAP, PMI-PBA, Enterprise Business Systems Analyst, Vertex, Inc.
- Kieran Gobey, Senior Consultant Professional Services, Blueprint Software Systems
- Rupert Kainzbauer, VP Product, Digital Wallets, Paysafe Group
- Saeed Khan, Founder, Transformation Labs
- Hoi Kun Lo, Product Owner, Nielsen
- Abhishek Mathur, Sr Director, Product Management, Kasisto, Inc.
- Jeff Meister, Technology Advisor and Product Leader
- Vincent Mirabelli, Principal, Global Project Synergy Group
- Oz Nazili, VP, Product & Growth, TWG
- Mark Pearson, Principal IT Architect, First Data Corporation
- Brenda Peshak, Product Owner, Widget Industries, LLC
- Mike Starkey, Director of Engineering, W.W. Grainger
- Anant Tailor, Co-founder & Head of Product, Dream Payments Corp.
- Angela Weller, Scrum Master, Businessolver
- 12 anonymous company contributors
Mature and Scale Product Ownership
Adopt Generative AI in Solution Delivery
Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence
Evolve Your Software Development Lifecycle Into a Solution Delivery Lifecycle
Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively
Improve Application Development Throughput
Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative
Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence
Perform an Agile Skills Assessment
Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
Mentoring for Agile Teams
Implement DevOps Practices That Work
Deliver Digital Products at Scale
Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices
Define a Release Management Process to Deliver Lasting Value
2020 Applications Priorities Report
Agile Readiness Assessment Survey
Define a Sourcing Strategy for Your Development Team
Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery
Implement a Transformative IVR Experience That Empowers Your Customers
Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach
Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation
Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software
Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop