Transcript
Transcript: The Importance of Trust and Transparency when Delivering User-Centred Products and Services
[00:0:01: Text appears on screen: The Importance of Culture when Delivering UserCentered Products and Services with Ayushi Roy]
In today's session, we'll be talking about socializing product work. We'll discuss why this is important, what it means and how it can be done.
Let's discuss why socializing product work is even important. In product teams, product and technology work alone is necessary, but not sufficient for the work to be successful. In other words, technology work is just a portion of the work of product teams. There's many other components to ensure success. Why? Because building software is often the easiest part of government product work. The hard parts are often governance, resourcing people and culture problems. And addressing all of those problems takes thoughtful communication and relationship building. Simply put, the best product people are often both product and people-people. What does this mean? Well, it means it's important for product owners to socialize product work in a variety of different ways: within the team, with decision makers, with stakeholders across the organization, as is necessary for the product and technology work to land.
[00:01:15: Text appears on screen: Who is a naysayer blocking your path? Who do you need active support from?]
It's important for the work to ultimately build alignment, build trust, and also build a shared language and narrative. Each of these components can be built in various ways with the various stakeholders involved.
The breakdown of a product owner's responsibilities can vary between the product components and the socializing components, depending on who their stakeholders are. In some environments, if you have supportive executive stakeholders already, it might be possible for 75% of your work as a product owner to be focused on the traditional technology responsibilities and only 25% to be focused on that sort of product- 'ambassadorial work' is what I'm calling it here. However, if you have a stakeholder who is more resistant to the work that is being done and doesn't understand the empowerment necessary for a product team, it's possible for 75% of your work to actually be focused on socializing the efforts, building understanding, trust and relationships, and 25% at a given time to be focused on the traditional responsibilities.
The breakdown of technology versus socializing work can also vary drastically over the lifecycle of a product. At an early stage of the product if the stakeholders are not supportive or have little understanding or buy in of the style of work necessary to succeed, it could be that the majority of your time, as mentioned earlier, could be spent on socializing rather than technology efforts.
[00:02:45: Text appears on screen: Product and Socializing]
However, as stages of products go on, it's possible that you are able to spend nearly 100% of your time on the product work because you've already secured the buy in necessary from stakeholders. And then potentially at that launch stage, stage five, there's anxiety from your stakeholders all over again and it flips once again. You're spending more time doing socializing, buying and relationship building to ease over concerns rather than focusing on technology efforts. And that is part of the work. It's not just work to focus on technology efforts and code and roadmaps. It's actually important to focus on all of the layers around product work, as mentioned, governance, resources, people and relationships to ensure the technology efforts land.
How is all of this done? Well, it's done throughout the product process. It has to be done in parallel with the technology workflow and baked into the workflow. It is also done across various stakeholder groups. Ask yourself and your team, who is a naysayer blocking your path and who do you need active support from?
[00:03:43: Canada School of Public Service Logo of book opening; Text appears on screen: Canada.ca/school-ecole]
