Product Management with Cost of Delay

This 2-day workshop will be delivered by Özlem Yüce from Black Swan Farming.

Product Management and Product Ownership are incredibly difficult roles. The easy part is handling the jargon and strange terms that Product Managers and Product Owners face. The hard part is helping the team navigate an ocean of options, in a fast-changing complex environment.

Rather than trying to control the waves, our workshop is designed to give Product Managers and Product Owners the understanding and skills you need to learn how to surf. We’ve done this in lots of different organisations from Fortune 500 companies and public sector organisations to early stage startups. We don’t just talk about this stuff, we do it for real and we are always learning better ways of doing it as we go. We want to help others do it too – to ride the waves of change.

There are 4 key skills that Product Owners or Product Managers need to have:

Managing Demand

To succeed in product development, product owners need to help the team focus. In an ocean seemingly full of urgent and important options, there will be some very high Cost of Delay opportunities. It’s all too easy to get distracted and confused – and miss the opportunity. Through our education we equip product owners with the skills and techniques to be able to handle demanding customers, users and other stakeholders.

• Prioritisation using Cost of Delay and CD3

Breaking down work

Even when we know which outcomes we’re shooting for, there are hundreds of different paths we could take when delivering products. And all of those potential journeys start with a first step. We don’t just want to choose any path, or any first step, we want to get to users quickly and maximise the amount of learning along the way. Breaking down work to small enough pieces to improve flow and visibility key to this. We will teach effective tools for slicing problems and solutions.

• Techniques for understanding the problem and the user
• Slicing MVPs
• Story mapping

Forecasting & Roadmaps

Often, before the starting gun has even fired there are a bunch of people asking: “So, how much do you think this is going to cost? And, when do you think it will be done?”

Some will say this is unknowable; that any response is a guess at best, and a lie at worst. But when you’re trying to make investment decisions, or if you have other dependencies to plan for, these are perfectly reasonable questions that a good product owner will be able to handle. In our education program we will cover various techniques for product owners to be able to answer these questions.

• Delivery metrics that matter
• Forecasting techniques
• Developing hypothesis driven roadmaps

Building Quality Products

Product ownership today is less about planning and execution, it is much more about how quickly you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Product Owners in particular need to understand that quality is primarily a function of how fast your feedback loops are. The most important of these is fast and clear feedback from the users. But it goes much deeper too. We will equip product owners with the right skill to implement new feedback loops as well as increase the speed of existing feedback loops to drive quality.

• Feedback loops
• Synthesising user feedback
• Effective Demos
• Better Retros

Learning outcomes

You will learn how to:

• Manage demand, expressing value and urgency using Cost of Delay
• Break work down, figure out where to start and which path to take
• Design a first increment that delivers value earlier
• Improve your roadmaps by highlighting the key hypothesis you need to test
• Improve stakeholder management with more accurate delivery forecasts
• Speed up key feedback loops to improve quality and build products customers love.

Who should participate?

• Product Owners and Product Managers who’d like to enhance their skills
• Business Analysts who’d like to learn more about Product Ownership/Product Management
• People who are in leadership roles in product development

Information about the instructor

Özlem Yüce is a passionate, highly skilled and knowledgeable product development consultant who leverages modern management principles, practices and methods. By influencing the way people think and act in the complex environment of product development, she enables organisations to innovate faster.

She has 15 years experience working in product management and worked with everything from Fortune 500 behemoths to fast-growing Inc 5000 startups. Clients include public and private companies from various industries such as Credit Suisse, TUI, Vistaprint, William Hill, Ericsson, Bristol City Council, HighSpeed2, Office for National Statistics, UCAS and others.

Along the way, Özlem has engaged with all sorts of organisational cultures and loves helping them learn and improve. She also enjoys sharing her experience with others and regularly speaks and delivers workshops at international conferences. She recently co-authored an IEEE paper called “Black Swan Farming” on the use of Cost of Delay at a Fortune 500 company.

When she's not travelling around the world consulting, teaching and speaking, she likes reading and going surfing. Once a year, for some unknown reason, she is glued to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Most of all though, she loves bringing people together and helping them change the way they work – so they love what they do.