Every Product Owner needs to consider where they lie on this spectrum from internal to external, from BA to Product Manager

Each of these areas of responsibility is described in the sections below. Connecting with the Customer The cloud is everywhere, and it fuels digital business and enables DevOps and a more efficient CDP. SAFe enterprises can harness the power and ubiquity of the cloud to increase agility in all areas of the organization. Team and ART Flow Regardless of whether a solution is consumed internally or sold externally, Product Management is essential to its success. This article describes Product Management’s multi-faceted role in SAFe and how it enables the continuous, sustained delivery of value. Key Collaborations Adopt a customer-centric mindset– Effective Product Management is driven by a customer-centric mindset in which the customer is placed at the center of every decision. Supported by the tools and techniques of Design Thinking, this mindset focuses the entire organization on creating desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions.Continuous Integration builds quality into the development process by continuously integrating many Agile Teams’ work. Business Owners are key stakeholders of the ART and have ultimate responsibility for the business outcomes of the train. It is common for product managers throughout the organization to work together in developing a final solution that is composed of several integrated solutions (Figure 4). Figure 4. Teams of Product Managers working together to create a solution Measurement– Supports learning and continuous improvement by understanding and measuring the flow of value through the pipeline.

Think and feel like the customer – Apply empathy and strive to see the world from their customers’ point of view.This approach makes this the practical explanation of product roles that so many of us need to be successful, rather than the usual theoretical discussions of development process or business. ARTs are cross-functional and have all the capabilities—software, hardware, firmware, and other—needed to define, implement, test, deploy, release, and where applicable, operate solutions. An ART delivers a continuous flow of value, as shown in Figure 1. Continuous Exploration promotes innovation and aligns with what should be built. Design Thinking continually explores customer and market needs, defining a Vision and Roadmap. Ensure product completeness– Product management ensures that solutions meet a wide range of customer needs. ‘Whole solutions’ are designed from the customer’s perspective and comprise multiple features that together deliver complete, engaging end-user experiences. Stabilize and Operate describes the practices needed to make sure the solution is working well from a functional and non-functional perspective

Platform team – organized around the development and support of platforms that provide services to other teams. Empathize with the customer – Solutions must deliver valuable experiences. This requires organizations to design each solution from the customer’s perspective, putting preconceived ideas aside. Product Management leads the way by utilizing personas, empathy interviews, empathy maps, and related tools to capture and communicate customer wants and needs.

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Each of these team topologies maps to a specific set of responsibilities and behaviors, and together they provide a clearer and better model for organizing Agile teams in SAFe. Further information, as well as guidance for applying these topologies, can be found in the Agile Teams article.