Product Delivery

We align our products to mission outcomes and manage the complex stakeholder environment that is government. We partner to improve processes where we can. We ensure clear line of sight from our efforts to meaningful public service outcomes.

Product work tends to be fewer in number of people, but high in impact. Great product and program management results in teams that have clarity on what to build and why, reduced delivery risk, increased customer and stakeholder buy-in, and strong executive support. Most importantly, great product management means we focus our effort where it has the greatest impact on mission outcomes.

Product work mostly ensures we are “building the right thing”. This requires that we:

• Research the customer policy goals, constraints, and processes.
• Drive discovery activities that ensure we are aligned to high-value problem statements and solutions.
• Analyze risk in terms of feasibility, desirability, and viability.
• Prioritize team activities toward validating or invalidating critical risks or assumptions.
• Create product roadmaps that convey the general sequence of product feature delivery in the coming months.
• Review and write documentation about the product and features.
• Form effective relationships with customer stakeholders and SMEs.
• Ensure that input and discovery related to engineering feasibility and user research are appropriately considered and used across the team.

Government Product Management

More than other capabilities, product management in government is distinct from the commercial world. Technical and design practices tend to translate pretty well, but product has some fundamental differences.

• Profit Motive: Commercial products have a relatively simple mandate: be profitable on a sustained basis and grow revenue and profit. The government doesn’t seek profit nor growth for its own sake.
• Reporting Lines: Related to the lack of profit motive, there are less clear reporting lines. Plenty of commercial product managers have juggle a bureaucratic mix of stakeholders, but government is different. There are often interplays between different federal or state/local agencies to achieve an overall policy.
• Legal & Funding Framework: An effective government product manager has to understand some fundamentals of the agency’s enabling legislation, congressional oversight, funding streams, and other related context.
• Compliance: The government cares about compliance. We care about protecting sensitive data and the integrity of government digital services. We accelerate that compliance through automation and experience in building government systems.
• Authority: While commercial product managers are sometimes considered a “mini CEO”, a government product manager will not have anything like unilateral authority. Rather, they build influence by building credibility and using reason and soft power to advise their government counterparts on product direction.

Discovery

Product managers facilitate discovery activitiesto align efforts to the right problems and quickly narrow in on the right solutions. Discovery is a highly inter-disciplinary and collaborative process among Pluribus and our customers.

Agile Project Management

Effective product management requires effective project management. We must navigate a stakeholder environment where commonly no one person can authoritatively say “yes” but many stakeholders may have the authority to say “no.” We must understand the role, authority, and motivations of those stakeholders to help our work move forward.

Program Management

We often must deliver a larger program of multiple teams supporting multiple product lines. We keep all efforts aligned to the mission need while being effective at nuts-and-bolts team coordination, issue escalation, stakeholder management, dependency management, and customer satisfaction.

Key Product Practices

• Mission framing: Instead of revenue, profit, or engagement metrics, the effective government product manager aligns the product to real mission objectives and outcomes. This impact is the rough equivalent of profit and value-for dollar. In the popular Feasibility/Desirability/Viability view of product management, mission impact is the real indicator of viability.
• Great demos: The product manager coaches the team on giving great demos. They ensure each team member has the right context to frame each demo in terms of value to the mission. (See also the Storytelling section.)
• Food pyramid: An effective roadmap of work will include a consistent ratio of “pretty” work as part of the mix. This is a shorthand way to refer to highly-visible, often user-facing, functionality that many stakeholders and their managers can see, understand and be proud of. Having some of this work helps to sustain support for the roadmap. Don’t do all that work upfront, or you may have trouble gaining support for other necessary but “less pretty” work. Think of it like the ‘food pyramid’ where a balanced diet includes a little bit of sugar along with healthy amounts of vegetables and protein.