Part 1: Collaborative Product Framing

1. Gain a common understanding of the who? what? and why?
2. Establish goals and success measures for the product/product line and map those to corporate initiatives
3. Identify the target market segments and design targets
4. Identify and document market conditions
5. Discuss and document strengths and constraints that will be leveraged or need mitigation plans

Part 2: Market Segment/Design Target Definition

1. Prioritize identified target design targets or market segments
2. Identify design target’s desired goals and outcomes
3. Define how to measure success in meeting the needs of the design targets
4. Develop pragmatic personas for 1-2 design targets

Part 3: Visualize Your Candidate Initiatives (Large and Small)

1. Apply techniques for visualizing our opportunities for solving user problems. It might look like one or more of the following:
   1. Story, opportunity, or value stream mapping
   2. Affinity mapping
   3. Work in progress (WIP) mapping
2. Discuss balance of market needs, buyer needs, user needs, and product needs (e.g. KLO or technical health)

Part 4: Techniques for Grouping and Sequencing Those Ideas – Affinity Mapping & Customer Journeys

1. Discover horizontal paths through the experience or other logical groupings
2. Identify areas with greatest need for minimal viable learning (MVL)
3. Begin to order or “bucket” initiatives

Part 5: Roadmapping

1. Relative sizing of initiatives
2. Sequence based on cost/benefit analysis and release robustness
3. Identify the MVP and subsequence release timing and form into a roadmap artifact

The session combines presentation and interactive conversations to provide value post-class to the participants. Below is an example of an agenda, but can be customized to fit the needs of the client.

Part 1: Understanding Project vs Product

• Funding Models
• Approval Models
• Communication

Part 2: Understanding the 3-legged stool

• What is it?
  • Feasibility
  • Viability
  • Usability
• Why is it important?

Part 3: Understanding the role of a Product Manager

• Where do I fit in?
• Key Responsibilities
• Patterns and Anti-Patterns

Part 4: How can I bring skill sets from my previous role?

• Business Analyst
• Project Manager
• Developer
• Team Lead

Part 5: Understanding your Product

• You need to be able to answer these questions and explain why you care:
  • What am I building?
  • Why am I building it?
  • Who am I building it for?
  • How will I know it is successful?
• Creating your strategy
• Communicating about your Product
  • Roadmapping
  • Feedback Loops
• Sustaining your product

From Project to Product

• Project to Product overview
  • Difference: Project vs. Product
• Process and Approach
  • Waterfall
  • Iterative delivery with waterfall requirements
  • Blended discovery and delivery
  • Mean Time to Pivot (MTTP)
• Common constraints to transitioning from project to product
  • Lack of persistent, dedicated teams
  • Redefining the role of the PMO
  • Absence of Product Management capabilities
  • Separation of Business and IT
  • Project-based funding
  • Project planning
• Building persistent product teams
  • Project teams vs. product teams
  • The product management function

Product-Based Funding

• Product-Based Funding
  • “What?” and “Why?”
  • Incremental investing
  • Funding by product portfolios, families, and teams
  • Funding cycles and adaptive investments
• Designing your product-based funding model
• Examples and case studies

Planning and Product Horizons

• The Iron Triangle
  • From “fixed” time, budget, and scope
  • Certainty was always a myth
• Product roadmaps
  • Outcomes over output
  • Measuring value
  • When will it be done?
• Estimating in ranges
  • To fixed data and variable scope
  • Setting leadership expectations

Measuring and Learning

• Measuring outcomes, not outputs
  • Measuring progress, capacity, and flow
  • Measuring resilience and technical agility
  • Measuring product / market impact
• Validated learning

Course Wrap-Up

• Road-mapping your change

Part 1: Product Agility and Product Ownership

1. Expectations, curiosities, and the selection of product idea for the course
2. Product ownership
3. What is it?
4. What’s in it for you?
5. Why work this way? How did we get here?
6. Steering the bus
7. Visibility, control, flexibility, and maneuverability
8. Getting buy in

Part 2: Product Over Progress

1. Traditional, agile, and product-centered processes overview
2. Product centered thinking and principles (blending discovery & delivery)
3. Avoid being overly certain
4. Validate ideas early and fast
5. Develop customer insights
6. Practice product-driven architecture
7. Embrace responsive engineering
8. Building product communities, product owners, users, and markets

Part 3: Early Product Discovery

1. Framing design targets and your guess at their needs
2. Introduction to story mapping, story splitting, and customer journeys
3. Pragmatic sketching, prototyping, and other tools for early validation
4. Stories, acceptance tests, and learning from building

Part 4: Roadmaps and Planning

1. Making product choices
2. Iteratively delivering value
3. Sizing and planning across iterations

Part 5: Blending Product Discovery with Product Delivery

1. Establishing a sustainable discovery cadence
2. Establishing a blended cadence
3. Constraints
4. Adjusting to delivery constraints
5. Blending with operations and support
6. Losing “product” in delivery tools
7. Investing in analytics

Part 6: Measuring Product Impact