Product Expectations.md

Questions?

Any questions, please visit our #product channel on Slack

Overview

This document outlines the unique and shared expectations of the Product Lead (OCTO government staff, sometimes referred to as Product Owner) and the Product Manager (usually a contractor). Please review this document together when starting work and then periodically as a check in — it will improve your communication and reduce stress.

The intention is to use this as a framework for communication and expectation setting between our ourselves and our teams. The hypothesis is that this contributes to reducing stress and workload Creating a “one team” environment is the goal. Consider the elements outlined here as a guideline, a list of jobs to be done. Have the conversations about who is going to do them, what good looks like, and how you’ll communicate as a team overall. Document the outcomes so that everyone is aware and on the same page. There is no replacement for a conversation.

There are three key trigger points for when to have these conversations – outside of just setting up good practices.

• A whole new team is being formed

• Existing team is sufficiently changing its member makeup

• Existing team is taking on a new initiative that warrants revisiting existing expectations

Shared Expectations

Additional, specific expectations related to these categories are described in the following PO/PM-specific sections.

Product documentation Ensure product documentation — like the Product Outline — is up to date and publicly available on GitHub (or other appropriate locations). Document key decisions and product pivots. Onboard new team members by sharing documentation with them and explaining it.

• The Product Lead is responsible for working with the product manager, team, and stakeholders to

  • Determine, communicate, and align the product direction and goals
  • Ensure product documentation is accurate, useful, and not out of date

• The Product Manager is responsible for

  • Ensuring the team understands the product direction and goal and deliver towards it
  • Writing and contributing to product documentation

Communication: Foster healthy, open communication and blameless incident responses to continuously improve and grow as a team. Communicate in as open a channel as often as possible so that others may benefit — now or later while searching resources like GitHub or Slack.

• Proactively communicate the status and impact of the team’s work and cross-team dependencies to stakeholders, leadership, and other teams

• Provide regular updates to OCTO leadership and VA stakeholders about product development, improvements, challenges, and decisions

• Ensure the team understands the product, technical environments, and political environment

Goal and progress tracking

• Define and track progress against KPIs and OKRs

• Create and share artifacts like roadmaps, product outlines, user stories, sprint goals, and release plans with platform and other impacted teams

• Share outcomes by participate in Impact Reviews after launches

Quality control

• Ensure the team follows established OCTO product, design, and technical guidelines (for example, Platform Collab Cycles)

• Regularly review product analytics and task completion funnel data to track progress and identify problems

Data Driven

• Analyze qualitative and quantitative data related to products and services, and be able to speak to that with any audience

  • This looks like

    • Provide feedback on discovery session plans and findings

    • Approve KPI goals

Product Lead

Product Leads are primarily accountable for the outcomes of their products and services. They are sometimes referred to as the OCTO team member, government lead, or Product Owner — although VA stakeholders are also frequently referred to as Product Owners, so this can create some confusion. (Occasionally, contractor Product Managers do some of this work.)

Vision, strategy

• Determine the product direction and goals in collaboration with the product manager, team, and stakeholders. Review and update them at least quarterly.

• Maintain and share a high-level, agile, roadmap that is manageable and realistic

• This looks like

  • Collaborate regularly with stakeholders and team members to define roadmap priorities

  • Define and document OKRs with the team

  • Review OKRs against product direction and goals to determine if the product needs to pivot strategy or direction

Prioritization

• Set and provide timely guidance on priorities, goals, objectives, and desired outcomes

• Prioritize what contract team(s) will work on (REQUIRED)

• This looks like

  • Engage in strategic discussions and agile ceremonies to provide perspective and decisions on strategy, roadmap, scope, desired outcomes

  • Participate in team workshops as requested

Managing up, stakeholders

• Resolve or escalate blockers that impede the success of the team, involving (or deferring) the team as needed

• Defend product decisions using evidence gained from research or analysis

• Lead stakeholder relationship strategy and cultivate key relationships

• Explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Influence without authority

• This looks like

  • Participate in user research and invite stakeholders to observe

  • Make sure each team member and stakeholder are aware of the expectations and are set up to succeed

  • Gain commitments from leaders and team members who are not direct reports

Team leadership

• Motivate individuals to form cohesive teams

• Lead the team to stay on track for delivery while prioritizing team health

• Reduce or eliminate unnecessary government bureaucracy to create a healthy and productive environment for teams to focus on shipping products over processes.

• This looks like

  • Maintain a bias towards action by understanding the current work and actively anticipating and preparing for future work.

  • Enable cross-functional teams to work together effectively by empowering them to do their best work and protecting them from unproductive external demands

  • Continuously ask yourself, “What problem are we trying to solve?” and then ensure the team is focused on delivering a minimum viable product

  • Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good

Contract Management

• Coordinate vendor management with OCTO acquisition team (REQUIRED)

• Identify and escalate staffing gaps or performance issues with the vendor and then, if not resolved, to OCTO leadership and the OCTO acquisition team

• Review and recommend that the Contracting Officer's Representative (COR) accepts or rejects that work (REQUIRED)

• This looks like

  • Plan for contract period of performance timelines

  • Approve sprint goals and recommend that the COR accepts or rejects deliverables

  • Help onboard new contractors and write justifications for computers or software

Product Manager

Product Managers are usually contractors who are responsible for the delivery strategy and day-to-day work to deliver products and services. (Occasionally, OCTO Product Leads do this work.)

Product strategy, vision

• Transform Product Lead’s high-level vision into detailed action plans

• Ensure the team understands the direction and goals of the product or service so they can deliver towards it

• Provide feedback to the Product Lead about the viability and accuracy of their strategy, measures of success, when additional user research is needed, and long-term roadmap

• This looks like

  • Organize the team to incrementally deliver on product direction and goals

  • Facilitate workshops, Product Lead check-ins, and other discussions to align the team around priorities, goals, scope, and strategies

  • Include the Product Lead in agile ceremonies so they can provide their perspectives

Prioritization, planning

• Create short-term roadmaps by planning and scoping the size of the effort and resources required to achieve goals (2-3 months)

• Ensure the team is clear on what to work on now and next (in alignment with the roadmaps)

• Communicate relative priorities of items within each sprint

• This looks like

  • Manage the product backlog, board, and associated agile processes

  • Manage the team on a day-to-day basis, including by leading agile and scrum team meetings and ceremonies

  • Cross-team planning (like PI planning) with stakeholders, middleware, API, and backend teams

Managing up, stakeholders

• Escalate blockers that impede the success of the team to the Product Lead, or directly with stakeholders if agreed with your Product Lead.

• Summarize the outcomes and impact of product initiatives on Veterans or other users, our tech stack, and VA programs

• This looks like

  • Elevate dependencies or other impacts to your team and Product Lead

  • Represent the team by presenting at impact reviews, Team of Teams, and other cross-team touch points

Product leadership

• Lead product discovery with a cross-functional team

• Coordinate and communicate decisions clearly – both in and outside of the team

• Advocate for the user’s needs and outcomes in collaboration with designers, researchers

• Define and incorporate relevant KPIs into product decision-making

• This looks like

  • Work with research teammates to articulate user research goals

  • Create actionable and prioritized user stories

  • Being the eyes and ears of the team and your Product Lead at Team of Teams

  • Make informed decisions so that the team can continue to move forward

  • Building pre-launch checklists and ensuring they’re completed

  • Make sure that individual team members own the portion of the Collab Cycle they best align to. For example, designer for Design Intent Review or engineer for Privacy & Security Review

Product Owner/Business (VA) Stakeholder

This section is coming soon