Talk: So, I am Product Owner now. But what’s my product?

Talk description

Title:	So, I am Product Owner now. But what’s my product?
Short synopsis:	When trying to establish long-lasting Scrum Teams in internal IT departments, where the output is not produced to be sold to customers but to be used internally, it is notoriously difficult to engage Product Owners from the business side. After all, IT applications are not easily regarded as “their product” or not even seen as a proper product at all. The introduction of micro-service architectures reduces the attempt to absurdity. Scrum forces us to reconsider the notion of products in this context. Which model is more adequate or of practical use and why? Which aspects of classical product management are usefully retained and will strengthen the internal product? Who will be the customer for the internal product to be customer-focused? Would that be the same as for customer feedback loops? Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	When first joining the IT for celexon Group – a rapidly growing e-commerce company – there was only one monolithic application that had been tweaked and added to in order to cover all purposes from online shops via warehouse management to controlling the phone system. Obviously, this application was IT’s main product even if it was not called that at the time. On the path of breaking up this monolith in order to replace it by a lot of newly developed services together with some bought in systems two things happened. The notion that IT provided products, if only internal products, to the company was pushed forward alongside Scrum’s role of the Product Owner. At the same time the clear-cut monolithic product got disrupted and replaced by something a lot more complex. But the old view of applications as products was held onto and lead to the new shop system, PIM system and marketplace hub to be identified as products. But who would be product owner for those, let alone the ever-growing number of micro-services replacing and connecting the bigger chunks? The idea became even more impossible on introduction of a data virtualisation application. Unsurprisingly it was almost impossible to find Scrum Product Owners or even team members from the business side to make up a cross-functional team for these products. It seemed that the concept of applications or services as IT products was not helpful when trying to establish long-term Scrum teams. In a first attempt at jointly creating an IT roadmap for the company using product vision boards the dilemma became even more notable. So, we awkwardly replaced the term product and used focus instead. At least this attempt yielded a lot of acronyms as focus candidates: CRM, WHM etc. Gradually it was accepted that even though we were still talking about predominantly IT projects for cross-functional teams with a business PO the product could be something larger encompassing not just software but business processes and possibly even more. In any case it would be something a lot less tangible that an application. The main question now, which we have only begun to answer, is the one I want to jointly tackle in this talk: what would be a good internal product model and how could possible candidates be evaluated? Which aspects of classical product management are usefully retained and will strengthen the internal product? Who will be the customer for the product to be customer-focused? Would that be the same as for feedback loops? Max size: 5000 chars
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