Daniel Coburn

In all of my days in product management & development, I have enjoyed looking at how different companies split up the responsibilities. In larger companies, every piece of the product life is split up to independent groups.  For example at Sears you had the business side that would decide what the product was and what it needed to do to meet the customer needs. Then you had the UX team that “interpreted”  what business wanted and received business approval. Then it would go to the FED and to development, which would again cause tweaks and changes.  In all it never seemed to allow the Product management to get exactly what they had asked for since collaboration was loose and not tightly intertwined in one cohesive group.  Even though we had the same DVP the directors all operated separately.  Going to development had a different DVP as well so many road blocks were put up there, but those were the technological boundaries.  The boundaries COULD NOT be undone simply because you willed them to be gone.  This made these more understandable.  To prevent this make sure IT is involved in your product meetings and you are involved in their meetings (especially if they have SCRUM’s be there weekly and daily if needed during the beginning).

Final thought, remember no one is out to destroy a product internally.  They all just have different concerns and it’s best to get them out in a kick-off meeting vs. during different level’s of hand-off’s.  And the owner of the product needs to have the ability to be involved at all stages so they can champion, answer questions, and make changes as it moves along.