Deliver – Produces various artifacts that are suitable for creating the solution. These solutions often start as prototypes with continuous delivery from the ARTs. Apply market segmentation – Not all users are the same. They have different challenges, desire different features, and value products differently at different times. Product Management divides the user population into segments based on common characteristics and defines solutions for the most appealing segments. Face-to-face PI Planning – The ART plans its work at periodic, mostly face-to-face PI Planning events. As noted earlier, Release on Demand (Figure 4) is the ability to make value available to customers all at once or in an ad hoc fashion based on market and business needs. Embracing DevOps Mindset, Culture, and Practices Conduct primary and secondary research– Primary data answers specific questions about product-market fit in specific usage contexts. Secondary data reveals macro-level trends across broad cross-sections of the market. Product Management leverages both to inform overall product strategy and specific elements of product design.

Discover – Seeks to understand the problem by engaging with users and market research to identify unmet needs. Businesses need to balance their execution focus with a customer focus to help ensure that they are creating the right solutions, for the right customers, at the right time. APD is grounded in customer-centricity, design thinking, and Lean UX putting the customer at the center of every decision. It applies design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable. Leffingwell, Dean. Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises. Addison-Wesley, 2007.ARTs are typically virtual organizations that have all the people needed to define, deliver, and operate the solution. This new organization breaks down the traditional functional silos that may exist, as shown in Figure 2. Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand – ARTs apply cadence and synchronization to help manage the inherent variability of research and development. However, releasing is typically decoupled from the development cadence. ARTs can release a solution, or elements of a solution, at any time, subject to governance and release criteria. In a flow-based system, establishing routine development activities on a fast, synchronized PI cadence—a regular predictive rhythm of team and ART events—is a proven strategy to manage the inherent variability in product development. The following activities support this cadence: Align on outcomes – Product Management ensures that solutions deliver tangible business value. They collaborate directly with Customers, Business Owners, and, when appropriate, Solution Management to understand the market forces, desired economic outcomes, and broader solution vision influencing product strategy. Building the right solutions requires deep knowledge of business strategy, customer segmentation, market dynamics, and value stream economics. The PO establishes a close relationship with Product Management to derive these macro-level insights and apply them to specific product domains. Building solutions the right way requires Team and Technical Agility, DevOps practices, and a Continuous Delivery Pipeline. These technical capabilities determine the speed and quality with which value can be delivered, and the PO relies on the Agile team to provide them.

Automation – Automation is used to reduce or eliminate human intervention from the CDP to decrease errors and reduce the overall cycle time of the release process. Moore, Geoffrey A. Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past. Harper Business, 2011. Every Product Owner needs to consider where they lie on this spectrum from internal to external, from BA to Product Manager Product Management’s responsibilities in SAFe fall into five main areas, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. Product Management areas of responsibility Build whole product solutions – Design whole product solutions for the user’s needs, ensuring that the initial and long-term user experiences are optimal and evolve as needed.Customer-centric businesses create greater profits, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. Customer-centric governments and nonprofits create resilience, sustainability, and the alignment needed to fulfill their mission. Cadence and synchronization assure that the focus is continuously on the evolution and objective assessment of the full system, rather than its elements. The system demo, which occurs at the end of every iteration, provides the objective evidence that the system is iterating. ART Execution, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery Internal customers are part of the enterprise. They receive solutions from one or more development value streams and leverage them in one or more operational value streams. For example, a team of underwriting managers at a bank may be internal customers of a credit scoring solution created by the IT department (Figure 3). Product Management plays an integral role in bridging portfolio strategy and execution. Customer needs must be translated into solution concepts that can be delivered by Agile Teams and achieve measurable business outcomes. Customer centricity and design thinking comprise the first dimension of APD. This mindset and way of doing business put the customer first, at the enterprise’s core, to provide positive customer experiences and build long-term relationships. Customer Centricity

Every product owner faces a complex and unique set of challenges within their team. This provides each individual the opportunity to fill the role with different ambitions, skills, and insights. Your product ownership journey can take a variety of paths, and The Art of Agile Product Ownership is here to be your guide.Author Allan Kelly, who delivers Agile training courses to major companies, pulls from his experience to help you discover what it takes to be a successful product owner. You will learn how you need to define your role within a team and how you can best incorporate ownership with strategy. With the Agile method, time is the key factor, and after using the lessons from this book you will confidently be able to synthesize features, functionality, and scope against delivery. You will find out how other team members such as the UX designer and business analyst can support and enhance your role as product owner, and how every type of company structure can adapt for optimal agility. Agile Product Delivery is one of the seven core competencies of SAFe, which is essential to achieving Business Agility. The Measure and Grow article provides a self-assessment for each competency, including APD, to evaluate a team’s proficiency and identify improvement opportunities. Why Agile Product Delivery? Figure 2 shows the core processes of design thinking, illustrated as a double diamond. This process focuses on thoroughly exploring the problem space before creating solutions. As a member of the extended Product Management function, the PO is the team’s primary customer advocate and primary link to business and technology strategy. This enables the team to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders while continuously evolving the Solution. Details Similarly, the overview of the a product owner’s potential responsibilities frames the discussion about what really happens.

Each ART builds and maintains (or shares) a CDP with the assets and technologies needed to deliver solutions as independently as possible. The first three aspects of the pipeline, Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, support the delivery of new functionality, as illustrated in Figure 5. Figure 5. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline The role scales with the complexity of the Solution. For some solutions, the Product Management function may be carried out by a single Product Manager. For others, a team of Product Managers may be required. Details