Product Management Handbook

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A white label product management handbook for government digital services

View the Project on GitHub scottcolfer/product-management-handbook

We have publicly available role descriptions

You can find and use product manager role descriptions and career pathway published on GOV.UK.

These product manager role descriptions and career pathway were created by UK government’s Heads of Product between August and November 2016, using feedback from their communities to help incrementally improve them during this time.

These role descriptions suggest that product management requires seven essential skills:

  1. Product ownership - Uses a range of product management principles and approaches. Captures and translates user needs into deliverables. Able to define the minimum viable product and make decisions about priorities. Writes stories and acceptance criteria. Capable of working with a range of specialists in multidisciplinary teams.
  2. Product lifecycle perspective - Understands the different phases of product delivery and is able to contribute to, plan or run these. Able to maintain a product or process through the delivery phases, through to live and into retirement. Able to lead a team through the different phases of the delivery lifecycle. Can maintain and iterate a product over time to continuously meet user needs. Understands and is aware of incident management and service support so that products are built effectively.
  3. Agile working - Is aware of and understands agile methodology and how to apply the agile mindset to all aspects of their work. Has the ability to work in a fast paced, evolving environment and utilises an iterative method and flexible approach to enable rapid delivery. Unafraid to take risks, willing to learn from mistakes and appreciates the importance of agile project delivery for digital projects in government. Able to ensure the team has a situational awareness of what each other is working on and how this relates to practical government objectives and user needs.
  4. User focus - Understands users and can identify who they are and what their needs are based on evidence. Able to translate user stories and propose design approaches or services to meet these needs and engage in meaningful interactions and relationships with users. Puts users first and can manage competing priorities.
  5. Problem ownership - Understands and identifies problems, analysing and helping to identify the appropriate solution. Is able to classify and prioritise problems, document their causes and implement remedies.
  6. Strategic ownership - Focuses on outcomes, not solutions. Is bold - develops ambitious visions and strategies. Gets the organisation and team to buy-in. Translates the vision into prioritised deliverable goals.
  7. Operational management - Able to manage the operational process of designing and running a product or service throughout its entire life-cycle. Able to implement best practice in new product or service development and knows how to plan and operationalise the stages of new product or service development. Able to overcome operational constraints to deliver a successful product or service. Works closely with other operational delivery teams.

We can measure our performance in each of these capabilities using our level of mastery:

These role descriptions are not infallible and not set in stone. They are published on Github and we can submit requests to change them if we see ways to improve them.