Running products in large organisations is a challenging task. Sebastian Lindemann of Product Coalition shares a few thoughts on high impact team cooperation modes.
How product teams can work together to maximize impact “Driving is easy if you are the only one the road“ … my driving instructor had many wise words to share. This one stuck with me as it is applies to so much more than driving a car.
Source: Doing the heavy lifting together
The Internet was built with de-centralized infrastructures in mind. To scale globally, network providers like CloudFlare have emerged, to run decentralized infrastructures and offer them as a service. In general, keeping service independent of each others and maintaining heterogeneous networks have a proven track record of resilience, that is not necessarily inherent to the architecture of these providers. Just like Akamai had a bad day in 2004, CloudFlare today suffered from a global outage, that left many obvious collateral problems visible all over the Internet. Bloomberg, among others, reports:
CloudFlare Inc., an internet service meant to protect websites from going down, faced its own network issues on Tuesday, leading to several prominent sites — like blogging platform Medium and video game chat provider Discord — being unavailable for some time.
Source: Net Defender CloudFlare Goes Down, Taking Many Websites With It – Bloomberg
The organisation that I am part of introduced an overlaying Product Management department only fairly recently, less than a year ago. Early in the time it was exciting to see this role dedicated to market and customer perspective, but it raised questions over how this was different from Product Ownership from day one.
Over the course of the past year many discussions have been led and lot’s of articles have been led. This week Anthony Murphy shared his perspective and experiences on the Product Coalition. While my own experiences with this separated role have been predominantly positive, I tend to see the necessity to split responsibilities for larger organisations. The article is reflecting on why the Agile movement created the Product Owner in the way it did and how it was meant to abolish the Product Manager to start with.
Source: The Collision of Product Management and Product Ownership
Benoit des Ligneris describes a model in his article about the environment in which product management has to navigate. This environment has many influences, and a product evolves with influences from many sources. The Maslov inspired pyramid of Product Managers needs starts with real world dependencies. The market is the basis for any product, hence is the most needed input to any product and the product management. Further in the article Benoit describes the individual layers and why they are relevant to the Product Management organisation.
While objectively everybody will agree a Product Manager will need to mediate between these layers, it may be worthwhile to evaluate the level of influence each individual layer has in a particular organisation. Most often the influence on the product is reversed and higher levels influence outcomes more than they should.
It’s the product management organisations responsibility to feed the product by its needs and not just represent but balance all layers in the decision management process. A lot like in the Maslov pyramid, a healthy product starts with basic needs.
A useful and visual mental model that represent the product management role in relation to its environment.
Source: The pyramid of the product manager needs (Maslow inspired)