30/01/2023, 00:25 Delighted about Product Management - Scaled Agile Framework

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Delighted about Product Management

NEWS SAFE FRAMEWORK UPDATES

December 1, 2022 4 Comments By Marc Rix

Customers deserve the best experiences. Business stakeholders deserve winning

outcomes. Teams deserve to build and evolve innovative solutions. Today’s
enterprises need people who can apply market insights, business strategy,
technology strategy, and Lean-Agile thinking to define products and services that
delight all those who build, support, fund, and consume them.

These superheroes, collectively, are Product Management—a critical function in SAFe

that is responsible for defining desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions
that meet customer needs and for supporting development across the entire product
life cycle.

We are delighted to announce a special update to the Product Management article

to better convey the essential characteristics of this role.

We have expanded Product Management’s responsibilities into the five areas below,
recognizing that delivering sustainable value involves much more than simply getting
products built, shipped, and supported.

Delivering Value Exploring Markets and Users

Managing and Prioritizing Connecting with the Customer

Product
the ART Backlog
Management

Defining Product Strategy, Vision,

and Roadmaps
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30/01/2023, 00:25 Delighted about Product Management - Scaled Agile Framework
and Roadmaps
© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Product Management areas of responsibility

We have clarified the primary job to be done by Product Management. In addition to

defining valuable solutions, the glossary definition, which appears at the top of the
article, now includes active involvement in the ongoing evolution of those solutions.

We have updated Product Management’s key collaborations, emphasizing that

Product Managers not only apply specialized skills within their domain but work
closely with others in the organization to align on outcomes, steer the ART, and
continually evolve solutions.

Finally, we have streamlined the other, more peripheral aspects of the role to
emphasize the characteristics above. However, the article still explains the
differences between internal and external customers and appreciates that Product
Managers are often customers of each other when developing composite solutions.

We hope you’ll be delighted with these updates and encourage you to treat this and
the recently updated Product Owner article as a complementary set.

Enjoy!

—Marc and the Framework Team

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AUTHOR INFO

MARC RIX

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30/01/2023, 00:25 Delighted about Product Management - Scaled Agile Framework

COMMENT (4)

SHERILYN SEGREST
08 Dec 2022 - 2:11 PM - Reply

One thing I expected to see was a sixth spoke on the wheel that talks
about how product managers use data from what they have previously
delivered as an input into the future roadmaps. In my experience, that
focus on data-driven adoption is what differentiates modern day product
management from the way we did IT before we product managed it. It
really is holding the product manager responsible for the adoption of the
thing developed, and encouraging them to learn from what was delivered
for ongoing improvements and adoption.

MARC.RIX@SCALEDAGILE.COM
09 Dec 2022 - 3:49 PM - Reply

Thanks, Sherilyn. Although data-driven practices don’t appear as a

sixth responsibility area, they are hugely important and peppered
throughout the article. For example, ‘exploring markets and users’
and ‘connecting with the customer’ involve collecting objective
feedback about market preferences and trends, helping to establish
product-market fit early. As part of ‘delivering value,’ Product
Management measures product performance in-market against
expected outcomes, then folds those learning back into product
strategy. The other areas include responsibilities that involve various
forms of fact-gathering too.

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CHARLES MCBRIDE
02 Dec 2022 - 11:43 AM - Reply

Nice update to the Product Management article.

One small thought to consider. In the Product Management article Figure

1 it shows the System Arch as a standalone figure working with Product
Management, however in many organizations its more than one person.
Just like it is implied around Product Management as more than one
individual. The big picture implies plural with the System Arch/Eng icon. I
point this out as it implies one person in that figure and is not the case in
many organizations. It would be great to have the same icon in Figure 1
for System Architect as we see on the big picture.

It is well stated later in the write-up about PM’s working with System
Architects.

Great update!

MARC.RIX@SCALEDAGILE.COM
05 Dec 2022 - 12:53 AM - Reply

Thanks for the comment, Charles. You’re absolutely right. System

architecture is often a function rather than a single individual, in which
case Product Management may collaborate with multiple System
Architects to help steer the ART.

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