Clarasys has gained a wealth of experience working as Product Managers in the public sector. Product Management is a broad and evolving profession, covering a wide range of responsibilities. It is arguably still a new role, and therefore Product Management is a term that isn’t completely understood by everyone.
To help with that, we have put together a model to try to explain, at a relatively high level, how Clarasys applies Product Management to a government context. Government products, in particular, follow clearly defined phases of development, known as the Government Digital Service (GDS) standards, throughout which the responsibilities of a Product Manager and the outcomes they will work towards can vary. This model has visually brought that to life, by splitting up the phases of the product lifecycle and highlighting the work our product managers do in each.
The model our Product Managers use
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To make the distinction between the key responsibilities, outcomes, and the complex challenges that a Product Manager might take on, we have divided the model into three layers. The bottom layer highlights the key activities that we believe are the underlying requirements of a Product Manager across the product lifecycle. Though many of the responsibilities of a Product Manager will align to a particular stage of product development, the vast majority of them will repeatedly occur throughout the lifecycle of a product, such as roadmap development, engaging with users, and prioritising outcomes. Others may still occur throughout but may be more tailored to specific points along the journey, such as measuring ROI or improving adoption of the product.
The middle layer of our model demonstrates the outcomes the Product Manager should be enabling their team to realise. Again, there are some outcomes that will be repeated throughout the various stages of the product lifecycle (such as delivering communications and mapping back to the business case), but there is a clearer alignment for many of the outcomes to the stages – for example, defining the vision, personas and journeys early on, or ensuring the post-go-live support is of the required standard after the product is live.
Finally, the top layer of our visual highlights our understanding of the complexity that often comes in large government delivery programmes, and how we work to overcome the challenges that occur from them. For example, not only do our Product Managers work with delivery teams to identify a cohesive and holistic product vision, but they also liaise with technical and business design authorities to navigate complex dependencies, risks, and challenges. Whilst our Product Managers will drive agile ways of working, with iterative approaches and slices of functionality, they will also have to sometimes work within waterfall or hybrid structures, and marry the two together. They will have to work their agile roadmap into a broader enterprise backlog, or set of priorities, and they will have to manage complex interdependencies between programmes. This is where we take pride in knowing that our Product Managers live our values in delivering excellent results for our clients.
If you need product management support, please get in touch.
