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Developing Resource Skills to Support Your Product

You’ve built your roadmap, updated your backlog, and teams are working on your next product release. Should you now worry about growing the skills and technologies delivery teams have or are developing as part of the roadmap? In “The essential skills playbook,” AnnaBelle from Pluralsight highlights the 15 key skills teams will need in the future. What impact do these roles have for product owners?

Product ownership is far more than external customers needs and feature prioritization. Product management needs to consider three perspectives that directly impact their product. These may be separate roles or perspectives for a single product owner.

• Business Product Owner. LoB product owners focus on the products and services consumed by the organization’s external consumers and users. The role centers on market needs, competitive landscape, and the operational support to deliver products and services.
• Technical Product Owner. Technical product owners are responsible for the IT systems, tools, platforms, and services that support business operations.
• Operational Product/Service Owner. Operational product/service owners focus on the people, processes, and tools needed for manual processing, actions, and decisions when automation is not cost effective. Product owners in this space are typically called service owners due to the nature of their work.

Product owners need to consider the technical and operational needs for their product. Application roadmaps are important tools to help modernize technologies as the business and operational needs change. As organizations shift to enhance business agility, product owners need to consider both the underlying technologies that support their tools and the skills in the team that deliver and support those tools. Tools like Pluralsight and their top roles can be a great way to work with your product teams to develop longer term strategic roadmaps.

When using a product management platform, like Aha!, ProductPlan, Productboard, Airfocus, Targetprocess, Craft, Backlog, ProdPad, and Roadmunk, consider adding child roadmaps for technologies, skills, and other support considerations. You won’t need to update this as often as other roadmap items. Engage your business architects and enterprise architects.

Our Take

• Make sure your product roadmap and backlog take into account all three product owner perspectives.
• Trace your technology roadmap to your product feature roadmap to support future changes and improved agility.
• Consider using your operational product roadmap to include team skills development to support product modernization later.

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Want to Know More?

Build a Better Product Roadmap

• Create a roadmap that suits your objectives, the characteristics of your product, and the environment it lives in.

Build a Better Backlog

• The quality of your product backlog is key to realizing the benefits of Agile.

Transition to Product Delivery Blueprint

• Stop delivering projects. Start delivering products.

Build a Better Product Owner

• Strengthen the product owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.