What is a Product Office and why do you need one?
What even is a Product Office anyway?! Read on to find out.
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Most software companies in 2020 have Product Management capabilities, but not every software business has its own dedicated Product Office, and that’s a problem.
In the early stages of a business it is natural for Product-type work to be undertaken by a variety of teams and across a number of roles. Often, the Founder/CEO will take ownership because getting Product right is frequently what gets the business off the ground. Sometimes, the CTO or engineering department will take charge: they’re the ones doing the building so they may as well write the requirements (they think). In other scenarios, Product work is owned by the Sales function – a good idea because it ensure you build what customers want, but not a good long-term strategy.
This article is intended to demonstrate to you that your business needs a dedicated, independent Product Office and you need one asap, no matter how early you are on your journey.
What is a Product Office?
Product Offices can look very different from one another depending on the size and maturity of your organisation, so let’s focus on what they do. The Product Office has 3 major aims:
1. Ensure that the right things get built, at the right time, for the right people
2. Making the best use of limited resources (technical and commercial)
3. Translating Business Vision into Product Strategy and Execution
That’s a pretty big brief! And, I hope you will agree, a pretty important one too. So how does a Product Office do all of that?
Enablement of other functions
One of the most, if not the most, important thing a Product Office can do is enable other teams in the business. Be that through describing your products, their use cases, and their value to Sales and Pre-Sales to support new deals; advocating for better usage with Customer Success,; or giving Engineering teams certainty about what needs to be built, when and why.
Product people are master-enablers in a good way. We create webs of connection across and between business functions and so you’ll find us getting involved to support initiatives as varied as a marketing re-launch, or a move from offering your product as an on premise deployment towards SaaS.
Provision of Insight & Data
Good Product professionals can provide the business with both insight and data to help drive decision making. This can include market and competitor research, analysis following user engagement, and product profitability mapping.
Beyond this, through the deployment of Product Operations, your Product Office can collate data from across the business to help make better decisions about which markets and customer segments to pursue, which products to further develop or sun-set, and how to improve the product to make it more usable. You can find some specific examples in relation to Customer Success here.
Prioritization of what to build and when
We touched on this above as it relates to enabling the engineering team, but prioritization goes further than that.
The ownership of prioritization by the Product Office ensures that the commercial and technical pressures on the business are analysed holistically and balanced appropriately. It also ensures that there is a clear business case and value proposition for all new features and products, giving you a clear story for your board and investors.
Finally, prioritization helps not only the engineering teams but also your commercial teams by providing certainty about what will be delivered and when to your customers.
Prioritisation is hard though: read our article on best practice.
When do I need a Product Office?
Now!
I’m not being facetious: if you’re reading this I can guarantee you that you are ready to start building a Product Office. Maybe other people have been picking the work up until now, but if any of the following scenarios have recently emerged you need a Product Office:
- You have a significant amount of contract debt
- You have a significant amount of technical debt
- You are operating in two or more geo-markets OR verticals
- You have live customers demanding new features
- You have a backlog that would exceed 12 months to clear
- You are losing deals to competitors
- Your Board tells you that you need one!
Product Management needs to be taken seriously and given a seat at the table where decisions are made, and the sooner that happens, the better for the business.
Who do I need in a Product Office?
The diagram below demonstrates the skills and capabilities that must be included and balanced within a Product Office.
Business Strategy: an understanding of what matters to the business and an understanding of how that strategy could be executed in various ways.
Commercial Acumen: an understanding of how your offerings provide value to your customers; an ability to construct and evaluate business cases; having the skills to evaluate markets and competitors.
User Engagement: having the skills to engage with users to understand their perspectives, needs and challenges, and to play this back internally.
Technology and Innovation: an awareness of how your product works on a technical level in order to understand what can and cannot be done in the future; and a passion for on-going innovation.
Finding a single person who can do all of the above well is like finding a unicorn. But finding one to two people (or working with a consultancy) shouldn’t be too difficult. And, you can build up the office over time, perhaps starting with just one commercial Product Manager and one Technical Product Manager.
Where should the Product Office sit?
You can find countless debates online about this, but the answer is easy: it should sit under a Chief Product Officer, who should sit on the Executive Leadership team and report to the CEO.
Why? It needs to be independent of both the commercial and technical functions. Put it under your chief revenue officer and all you’ll do is rack up contract debt and follow the latest sales opportunity. Put it under the CTO and it won’t have the insight and access to customers that it needs to be effective.
Put it under a CPO with a direct line to the CEO and you have a recipe for success: access to business vision and strategy, ability to affect change and made decisions, access to users and customers, and accountability to their peers and the Board.
If you are starting to build a Product Office and need some help, get in touch, we can help.
-ACT