Dave West

Organizing product groups effectively is essential as organizations grow or shift from project-based models. Ideal product teams are small, cross-functional, flexible, and self-managed. Scaling often requires approaches like Team Topologies, with Stream-Aligned, Platform, and Enabling Teams, treating shared services and platforms as products. There’s no one-size-fits-all model, but key ideas include making self-managed teams the core unit, decoupling delivery from skills development, and striking a balance between people and product growth. Ultimately, success relies on people and a holistic approach to change.

This blog discusses the role of a Product Owner and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can serve as a valuable "teammate" to help scale Product Ownership. It addresses the common criticism of the Product Owner's broad scope and explains how AI can assist with tasks, allowing Product Owners and their teams to focus on more complex work. The blog also introduces a new Scrum.org course designed to teach Product Owners how to leverage AI in their daily work, clarifying that AI will not replace Product Owners but will act as a supportive partner.

This blog discusses managing a product portfolio within the Agile Product Operating Model(APOM). It emphasizes shifting from funding work to funding products/teams, empowering them with ownership and decision-making. It also covers minimizing cross-product initiatives to maintain focus, enabling product teams to handle discovery and validation, defining work in terms of outcomes and measures, and aligning incentives and governance with business strategy. It highlights the importance of transparency, cadence, and clear ownership in building a sustainable product organization. The blog also suggests that organizations evolve incrementally toward a product-oriented approach.

This blog explores how product definitions evolve in large companies, the debate around "sub-products," and the importance of empowering teams with a clear problem and the ability to release value. It suggests that "product-ness" might be a scale rather than binary, and that the key question is whether a product structure improves or reduces the team's ability to deliver value. The blog also acknowledges the impact of politics and the need for continuous product definition and adaptation.

Over the last year, we have continued to refine our understanding of the Agile Product Operating Model(APOM). In this blog, we discuss the key elements of APOM. The seven characteristics are Unique, Holistic, Evidence-based, Empowered Teams, Empirical, Complete, and Change Management built in.

Product definition is a complex, political and challenging task in large IT organizations. In this blog we discuss what organizations need to consider when looking at their product model. We discuss why shared services could be candidates to become products and the value of tying product to strategy and value. We provide some simple questions to ask of your products to help guide the selection and remind the reader that product models like organizational structures require people and people come with politics.

The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) is a natural progression for your agile transformation. It provides an ‘in-between’ stage between the whole enterprise change and delivery team change with the idea of products. By aligning to products, you can incrementally change the organization, allowing each product group to adopt a different operating model. Of course, that comes with some challenges, including how products are funded, comfort in parts of the organization operating differently, and where authority and decision-making reside.

Project to Product states that product-based approaches will replace project-based approaches for delivering digital work. The book Project to Product by Mik Kersten describes this approach, comparing how BMW manages production to how a bank delivers digital products—highlighting the complexity, bureaucracy, and lack of transparency in project-based approaches. The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) is a framework that helps organizations adopt a product-based approach. It helps organizations change mindset, alignment, and funding to support a product approach. APOM, an empirical approach, has seven characteristics: self-managed teams, learning-oriented, aligned incentives, empowered product leadership, integrated strategy, product investment, and agile governance.

In this blog, we dispel a series of myths associated with product discovery in Scrum. Myths such as “it's a phase in the process and can not be done in a Sprint,” “It's only for greenfield projects,” to “ The DoD stops us from doing Discovery”.

Discovery and validation should be an integral part of the work of a Scrum Team. It provides a collection of practices that enable Scrum Teams to drive an evidence-based approach to value.