The role of a product owner in digital transformation

The journey of a product owner with a product or service, is about gradually peeling the union of IT and organizational change. The product vision will uncover the areas in which the organization needs to change and set the requirements for the change.

Product ownership revolves around two questions: “Where do we need to go?” and “What does it take to get there?”. Oftentimes the answer to the second question takes some form of digital transformation in the organization. And what needs to change in the organization and IT depends on where the organization wants to go with its digital products and services. So the direction, the product vision determines what needs to change. The development of the digital product or service is not the digital transformation but what needs to change in the organization in order to deliver that is. Without the product vision, there is no need and no direction for any change. The product owner is responsible for the product vision and the realization thereof but also for directing the changes that need to happen in the IT and organization to make the delivery of the product vision possible. The changes in digital transformation come from the user stories and their requirements. Answering the question of what it takes to realize the product vision will lead down a path of discovery of the requirements and designing the required changes in IT and organization. Digital transformation is both about IT and the organization.

The seven layers of digital transformation

So what are the layers of the union that I have encountered while answering the question of what is needed to realize the product vision?

• The first layer is the product vision itself. Where does the organization need to go with the digital service? What is the roadmap? What are the priorities?
  The challenge here is to align all the stakeholders and consolidate all the different views in a design for the service.
• The second layer is that of the development team. The team needs the right resources, skills and organization. Since I am a product owner that means we organize the development process based on Agile principles.
  The challenge here is to put together a team and make sure it becomes a high performance team.
• The third layer is the IT infrastructure. Developing modern day digital services typically require an architecture that connects multiple information systems. We use a MACH architecture. MACH stands for Microservice-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless. Setting up an architecture involves many choices that impact the front-end of the application.
  The challenge here is to make informed decisions that take the impact on the front-end of the application into consideration. The risk is that the IT architecture is set up from a technological perspective only. The front-end of the application provides the requirements from a user and business perspective.
• The fourth layer is the data model. A big driver for the digital transformations in organizations is the shift from internal thinking to user-centric thinking. Successful digital services work from the needs of the user. Those are typically different from the internal needs of the business. If you dig deep enough, you will find that the choices that were made on a data model level that work for the internal processes of the business don’t work for the user. Typically those data models are the foundation of legacy systems that form the core of the digital operation of a business. Most businesses have a lot of IT in place to support their operation. The transformation is shifting that to supporting the user experience of the customers.
  The challenge here is not just to uncover a new data model that support the user experience but also to find a way to implement that model in legacy systems that are hard and costly to change.
• The fifth layer that you find if you dig even deeper is the human operations. Any system is only as good as the data that is in it. And data enters the system partly by humans that follow procedures. In the best case, employees have operated from a way of working that is aligned with the needs of the business. In the worst case, employees have bent the limitations and possibilities of the available information systems to support their procedures. Customer service is usually decoupled from the information systems that are geared towards internal business processes. Part of the digital transformation is a shift from a focus solely on supporting internal business processes to including the customer facing processes as well, both for employees and customers.
  The challenge here is to uncover the reasons behind procedures and to design new procedures and systems that support those procedures that make work better for employees and the user experience of customers at the same time.
• The next, the sixth layer is the mental model of user centric ways of working. Organizations are already user centric. If the organization didn’t offer products and services that users need, the organization wouldn’t exist. But a big part of why organizations need to transform is that user needs are changing. Demands on the quality of the user experience of a product or service are getting higher and higher. The battle for the preference of customers is fought on the battle field of user experience for more and more organizations. Innovations and disruptions come from different and better user experiences. New technologies enable new user experiences and organizations have to keep up with that to stay competitive.
  The challenge here is to translate the old levels of service that made the organization successful to that of the new technological world and improve them. And the mindset that goes with the ways of working that people are used to. Moving the this-is-how-we-do-things-here-attitude is difficult and takes time.
• The last and seventh layer that is also close to the first layer is the layer of corporate strategy. Corporate strategy will include some type of focus and allocating resources towards digital products and services. But the maturity around digital will need to grow. The best way to learn and grow is to do it. So doing digital projects will increase maturity but only if there is enough communication, expectations management, strategic alignment and open discussions in a safe environment. Learning involves making mistakes. But making mistakes is not enough to learn. Learning involves reflection and theoretical frameworks to understand what is happing.
  The challenge here is to harness the energy that is created around digital projects and continually align those project to the corporate strategy and continuously look for opportunities to learn and grow for all stakeholders involved.

Ownership of digital transformation

There are also external aspects like communication, marketing, sales of digital solutions but here I’m only looking at the internal digital transformation. Of course, as always, all things are connected. The question is where the role of the product owner ends. If the driving question for the product owner is what is needed to realize the product vision, this means the product owner needs to get involved in all layers of the digital transformation. Who else is going to do it? Product owners can focus solely on their products but that doesn’t work. All things are connected and product owners should feel ownership for all aspects of digital transformation for it to work. Ownership doesn’t mean responsibility. Ownership means having the best interest for something in mind and doing everything in one’s power to make sure it thrives, taking initiatives to bring about positive results. Ownership means not waiting for others to act and caring about the outcome as much as the owner of the company would.

Ownership means having the best interest for something in mind and doing everything in one’s power to make sure it thrives, taking initiatives to bring about positive results. Ownership means not waiting for others to act and caring about the outcome as much as the owner of the company would.

What a product owner feels ownership towards, the scope of ownership, differs from product owner to product owner. The way I see it, product owners can play an important role in the digital transformation of an organization. The product vision gives direction, creates requirements and is a platform for stakeholders to come together and have a co-creative discussion that is concrete. A digital product or service can act as a prototype for the changes that an organization needs to make, a visualization, a concretization of the direction and demands. And with this product in hand, the product owner can help make discussions more concrete and help prioritize options in decision making by creating the link to the impact on the user experience. And in the end, if the changes are not made in the organization, the product or service that a product owner needs to bring to the world doesn’t succeed.

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