| --------------------------------------- |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Talent Development |
Self-Growth: Actively seeks feedback and identifies own skill gaps. Participates in onboarding and peer knowledge sharing. |
Mentorship: Supports onboarding of new peers. Demonstrates growing independence and shares functional product knowledge. |
Direct Mentorship: Mentors POs/APMs. Models product craft and uses the PM Assessment to guide peer development. |
Career Coaching: Coaches multiple peers; influences promotions. Identifies high-potential talent across the squad. |
Succession Bench Builder: Identifies and grooms high-potential PMs for leadership. Focuses on bridging the skill gaps for SMEs transitioning into leadership roles. |
Institutional Mentor & Succession Architect: Establishes the departmental standards for psychological safety. Success is defined by the depth of the leadership bench and the ability for the org to operate with high-autonomy in the leader’s absence. |
| Delivery and Execution |
Sprint Integrity: Acts as "Voice of the Customer" in stand-ups. Owns the backlog and high-value story delivery. |
Release Planning: Owns small features end-to-end. Manages tactical timelines, removes blockers, and applies proactive verification to feature delivery. |
Roadmap Management & Milestone Verification: Owns delivery outcomes. Balances short-term fires with long-term goals. Establishes milestone-based execution paths and lightweight, consistent inspection cadences (Trust but Verify) to protect teams. |
Multi-team Flows & Inspection: Improves delivery systems across multiple teams. Establishes robust verification and feedback loops to ensure execution excellence and manage dependencies. |
Portfolio Capital Efficiency & Auditing: Manages investment balance. Systematically audits delivery systems (Trust but Verify) to ensure highest ROI per developer-hour, optimizes resource allocation, and champions DORA metrics and quality. |
Systemic Velocity & DORA Governance: Accountable for the health of the entire delivery engine. Champions DORA metrics and high-integrity milestone governance at the enterprise level, removing systemic friction. |
| Product Discovery |
Feature Validation: Understands user/stakeholder needs with guidance. Partners to ensure builds solve immediate functional/stakeholder needs. |
User/Stakeholder Research: Conducts interviews and usability testing. Identifies pain points through data synthesis to support value proposition. |
Value Proposition & Context-Appropriate Discovery: Leads discovery independently. Uses OSTs or other discovery methods for customer-facing validation, or lean Stakeholder Co-Design for internal captured-audience workflows. Ensures discovery is ahead of development to fail fast and cheaply |
Discovery Habits: Institutionalizes continuous discovery. Adapts discovery methods to team context (external vs. internal) to verify value and stakeholder alignment before development. |
Capital Risk Mitigation & Value Realization: Ensures every major initiative is validated through context-appropriate discovery (ex. OSTs for customer; workflow mapping for internal) to protect company capital. |
Evidence-Based Culture Mandate: Eliminates "Transformation Theater" by requiring evidence of discovery (customer validation or workflow value realization) for capital funding. Establishes a culture of validated learning. |
| Product Leadership and Operating Model |
N/A: Role is responsible for Process Adherence (following the POM), not designing or running an organization. |
N/A: Role is responsible for Process Advocacy and identified improvements, not organization-level leadership. |
Systemic Consistency: Implements consistency across their product area. Ensures team follows agile principles. |
Operating Design: Refines the POM for multiple teams. Bridges gaps between Product, Eng, and Design operations. |
Operating System Designer: Designs and iterates on team structures to minimize dependencies. Ensures the Product Operating Model is consistently applied to drive team autonomy. |
Enterprise System Architect: Owns the end-to-end Product Operating Model. Ruthlessly removes processes that do not contribute to outcome-based delivery; builds an environment where missionaries thrive and mercenaries are challenged. |
| Product Strategy |
N/A: Focus is on Contextual Awareness (The "Why" of stories), not independent Strategy definition. |
N/A: Focus is on Feature-Level alignment, not the creation of a robust Product Strategy. |
Strategic Alignment: Defines validated problem spaces. Ensures the roadmap/backlog ladders up to broader business goals and stakeholder expectations. |
Strategic Context: Defines success at the org/squad level. Translates market shifts (external) or business operational goals (internal) into clear strategic roadmaps. |
Portfolio Economic Logic: Connects multi-quarter product opportunities to the company’s financial health. Defines the investment and ROI strategy for the portfolio to maximize market impact (external) or workflow capital efficiency (internal). |
Strategic Context & Vision Evangelist: Transmits the "Why" with such clarity that teams can make autonomous, high-alignment decisions. Aligns the product vision with long-term market shifts, organizational efficiency, and enterprise goals. |
| Stakeholder Communication and Influence |
Team Syncs: Maintains clear daily standups and story descriptions. Documents tactical blockers and communicates up risks early and proactively. |
Stakeholder Syncs: Manages feature-level stakeholders. Proactively communicates tradeoffs, design notes, and status using clear, structured cadences. |
Proactive Alignment & Trust Systems: Facilitates prioritization. Engages stakeholders and managers proactively via multi-modal channels (structured schedules, status cadences) to build deep trust and validate value. |
Cross-Functional Lead & Alignment: Resolves ambiguity and manages conflict across the org. Establishes robust alignment systems with key stakeholders and influences senior-level decisions. |
Executive Bridge: Translates technical hurdles and delivery progress into business risks/returns. Proactively influences C-suite direction and builds alignment across diverse executive stakeholders. |
Executive Authority & Missionary Evangelist: Acts as a trusted partner to the C-Suite. Strategy and vision documents drive organizational direction. Transmits context to build a powerful "Missionary Culture" of outcome ownership. |
| Product Knowledge and Domain SME |
Functional SME: Deep product knowledge within the team. Understands tool/module workflows and tracks metrics. |
Domain Awareness: Understands HealthTrust business models and how features impact the customer experience. |
Outcome Tracking: Owns metrics and outcome measurement. Becomes the de-facto source for product-area questions. |
Industry Specialist: Deep understanding of the competitive landscape. Predicts market shifts based on domain expertise. |
GPO Business Architect: Possesses deep understanding of the GPO financial engine. Uses domain expertise to align product direction with complex stakeholder and regulatory landscapes. |
Market & Institutional Visionary: Represents the organization as a thought leader in the industry. Uses domain mastery to anticipate regulatory shifts and competitor moves, guiding the enterprise through systemic change. |
| Anti-Patterns |
The Order-Taker: Needs constant direction; veers into technical "how" instead of "what"; poor story quality. |
The Bottleneck: Fails to raise roadblocks early; "us-vs-them" attitude; disregards team process. Dismisses stakeholders. |
Discovery Dodger: Jumps into execution without validation; ignores KPIs; suffers burn-out by saying "yes" to all. |
The Specialist: Over-emphasis on complexity over value; misses details; has a "pet" agenda. |
The Ivory Tower: Strategy disconnected from business value; fails to delegate; resistant to feedback. |
The SME Micromanager: Unable to trust the system, defaulting to tactical SME control; refusal to move from "Knowledge-Owner" to "Environment-Builder". Constantly working "in" their business than on it. |