Change Agent
A change agent oversees the change management process. Change management is necessary when a new process or workflow is being rolled out and needs to be adopted by various teams. A change agent can be a dedicated resource focused on driving that project or it can be a component of someone’s job. Whether it be Agile transformation or scaling product management to product portfolio management, a change agent champions the movement.
Within the product organization, the roles that usually act as the change agent are the Chief Product Officer, Product Operations or Agile Coach or Consultant.
A change agent’s goal is to facilitate effective transformation without disrupting the organization. Their responsibilities can include creating a change management plan and roadmap, leading a change management team, and communicating change to the organization.
Change Management
Change management is the structured process of supporting an organization through a people, process or technology change. Significant organizational change can be challenging. It often requires many levels of horizontal and vertical collaboration and across teams. Developing a structured approach to change is critical to help ensure a beneficial transition while mitigating disruption.
Change management typically consists of a change agent to drive visibility around the change, communicate the plan, and drive progress towards it while minimizing disruption.
Chief Product Officer
The Chief Product Officer is a C-suite leader and the highest-level executive within a company’s product organization. The CPO leads product teams across multiple product lines and divisions while setting the strategic product direction. Chief Product Officers oversee product vision, innovation, design, development, and the entire product portfolio.
While Product Managers often have a mindset based on prioritization, CPOs shift their mindset towards allocation, financial resources, and business objectives to move the whole company forward, not just one product. Successful Chief Product Officers ensure product investment is aligned to business goals and accelerate outcomes while reducing operating costs.
Modern CPOs apply a portfolio approach to balance the needs of customers, business goals (OKRs) and scarce engineering resources to achieve the best product outcome.
“A CPO is at the executive level and needs to understand the gaps, design the strategy and enable themselves with enough data to get answers and drive results. It’s such an important role for any organization that uses software as you can make or break the business strategy.”
– Melissa Perri, CEO, ProduxLabs
Churn
Churn refers to the number or percent of users that cancel or discontinue their subscription. A high churn rate is indicative of general dissatisfaction with a product or service.
Churn rate = (Customers lost in a period / customers at the start of a period).
Continuous Planning
In Responsive Product Portfolio Management, continuous planning is the natural evolution of annual planning where outcome-focused teams continuously review and re-analyze strategy and use past product outcomes to influence future company decisions. Agile companies take a continuous planning approach to ensure they remain competitive and responsive to changing market needs, product performance and new inputs.
Conway’s Law
Conway’s Law is a term coined by Computer Scientist Melvin Conway which states
“Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
This challenge has become even more pronounced in today’s decentralized organizations, such as scrum teams and different functions, AND as a product or feature often requires multiple teams and functions to bring to life.
Therefore, regardless of how an organization is designed, the inherent silo effect persists—leading to fragmented products, slower time to market, and misaligned strategies.
To counter this, product leaders need the right tools to connect silos and foster shared context for decision-making. Tools like Dragonboat as an orchestration and decision layer on top of individual teams and functions can achieve just that.
Looking to break down silos and align your teams? Download our free template on how to best structure your product organization and create a more cohesive, efficient team environment.
CPTO
A CPTO, or Chief Product and Technology Officer, is a senior executive responsible for uniting the strategic vision of product management with the technical execution of engineering. Combining the roles of the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the CPTO bridges product strategy with technology development, ensuring alignment, innovation, and business impact.
Cross-Team Collaboration
Cross-team collaboration occurs in a product organization when a group of people with a wide range of skills from different product areas and/or multiple teams (like engineering, marketing, and customer success) work together in order to complete a project or contribute to a shared initiative. Cross-team collaboration is often essential in order for large, multi-quarter initiatives to be successful.
Within the product organization, product operations plays a key role in orchestrating cross-team collaboration because they increase stakeholder visibility, plan outcomes and facilitate quarterly planning.
Customer-Centric
A customer-centric company (vs product-centric) focuses on keeping its customers happy above all else. The end goal is to create a product that completely satisfies its users. Therefore, the company will pour all of its resources into this aim. The value of a customer-centric company is that customer needs will be a top priority, but needs pertaining to protecting the company’s longevity may go unmet. A potential risk of a customer-centric approach is becoming a feature factory.
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