Leads:
Pauline Larmaraud, Product Owner within DoR, for two web applications:
- SOLO - students apply for opportunities available on campus
- Seed Funding - faculty apply for opportunities
Joe Knox, Product Owner of various products including Stanford Mobile
Regarding the role of the Product Owner / Product Manager at Stanford. Other people who wear this hat may have titles such as Business Analyst and Project Manager. Perception of the role. We are going to start a Product CoP soon so we're looking for what might be useful from you.
What does the role mean to you?
- You own the product, people come to you when they need something, you buy it or build it, and then you’er always there when they need support and new features over time. You need to know everything about the product and all integrations.
- Representing all stakeholders, keeping in mind all of the things you’ve been asking.
- Most Stanford departments are missing some of the roles from industry - writing job aides, training users, training new people on business processes.
- The bridge between the non-technical and the technical. Bi-lingual - translating between the needs of the business, the users, and the technical approach.
- Translate the learnings and what you hear into actionable results.
- The Product Manager is often the default role who will tend to user experience and design concerns if those roles aren’t available on the team.
- Product Manager owns the vision and prioritizes what is the best value we can deliver based on all the needs collected from stakeholders.
- Creating the strategy and the roadmap to achieve the vision.
- The public face/voice of the product, and the advocate of the end users.
Do you have a dedicated project manager, user experience, etc., and how distributed, how embedded are they?
- Project manager and product owner is often the same role.
- Larger projects - usually separate project manager, product owner, UX designer, and developers.
- Product owner, 3 or 4 developers, plus Scrum Masters.
Question: how are all these people classified in the Stanford job classifications? We never see product manager/product owner, scrum master. The person who asked is a product manager classified as a web developer. Often they are project manager, business analyst.
The CoP could work to come up with a series for HR for a new job classification for Product Manager. This role is not the Product Marketing Manager at all, just uses same word.
How do you deal with conflicting request from stakeholders? Pauline brings them all in the room together to discuss and learn from each other and decide together. Surprising results - they want more in common than the knew, and they learned from each other and in some cases changed their business processes based on what they learned.
Resources a CoP could provide:
- User experience business case.
- How do fold in user experience activities such as early prototype testing prior to development, with low to no price tag.
- Marketing PMs to the rest of the university, including a common job description: establish a common understanding of the role.
- Training! Leverage the d-school students to create presentations to explain product design, project, product as well.
- Collaborate on best practices for a published roadmap, and the tools used for publishing it, and how ideas are taken into account.
- Process for how to prioritize consistently and intelligently and put that together with proper resources and timelines.
- Better ways to coordinate backlogs across products (where certain Stanford products would be a better fit than my product).
- Training each other! And share other relevant training opportunities.
- Tools for finding yourself in the role of a product owner (you didn’t expect to be here)!
What will the CoP do first?
- Getting the word out will be key: Slack channel, communications team has a checklist to set up a CoP.
- Toolkit: prioritize the things that should be in there. Coordinating it.
