#218 – The Product Organization

We’re happy to see that a growing number of organizations are moving away from being project-driven and, instead, invest in becoming product-centric, as this fits very well with the agile ways. Some of the changes this leads to include organizing around products, product portfolios or Value Streams, recruiting product people, adopting DevOps practices to ensure the quality of and attention to the full lifecycle of the products, and changing the funding model to fund the costs of teams (of teams) instead of the work.

However, what these organizations often forget is to spend enough time and effort in initially defining what a product is in their specific organizational context. “A vehicle to deliver value”, as the Scrum Guide states, is too abstract for many organizations, so seek some inspiration on how to make product definitions from, e.g., Roman Pichler, Marty Cagan or the ideas in Large-Scale Scrum by Bas Vodde & Craig Larman—and make sure to hire a dedicated Product Management Coach to help you with these discussions and practices before changing anything.