Product management is responsible for value

Our teams require at least three perspectives if they are to work well:

Value - Workflow - Quality

This is true of delivery teams, management teams, and leadership teams.

Product management’s focus is optimising value, and so is most useful to an organisation when we are given responsibility for value. We need to understand workflow and quality but equally need to acknowledge that they are not our strengths and that others will be better at them than us. We’re only useful as a profession when we understand our relationship with other professions.

Value	Workflow	Quality
Value professionals are responsible for improving the value of things but still need to understand workflow and quality	Workflow professionals are responsible for the workflow of teams and departments but need to understand value and quality	Quality professionals are responsible for the quality of things but need to understand value and workflow
Value professions include product management, business analysis, economic analysis, portfolio management	Workflow professions include delivery management, project management, programme management	Includes lots of professions, all those that ‘do’ and ‘build’, e.g. developers, technical architects, designers, communication, training, service desk

Reading: Roles in production systems Melissa Perri, Dan North, Joshua Arnold, Georg Fasching