Courtesy of Cprime's Devin Anderson & Jesse Pearlman, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Market Value by Design for Financial Organizations: How to Leverage Product Agility Thinking and Atlassian Jira Align' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Summit in Financial Services Live.

Session Information:

Market Value by Design for Financial Organizations: How to Leverage Product Agility Thinking and Atlassian Jira Align

In a time where companies’ tenure on the S&P500 is half of what their predecessors were, it is crucial to ensure that product and tech teams are aligned in strategy and execution. Aligning work behind the discovery of customer needs is paramount to stay competitive in the fast-changing world of financial services.

Join Devin Anderson, Strategic Product Coach (Cprime), and Jesse Pearlman, Enterprise Agility Delivery Manager (Cprime), to learn how aligning corporate to product strategies enables faster discovery and pivots in an ever-changing market landscape and helps the organization align behind the why. Don’t overemphasize the agile processes and ceremonies. The real secret is about implementing an agile mindset through continual discovery and pivoting in the market to deliver the highest value to your customers based on their changing needs.

In this session you’ll learn:

• How financial organizations can refine product understanding 
• How to better align Corporate to Product strategy
• Ways to optimize your product roadmapping and planning to attain desired business outcomes
• How to use Jira Align to drive maximum value and optimize financial allocations across all teams and projects

Session Transcript:

And I'm talking about Devin Anderson and Jesse ..., who are product strategy coaches and practice leads, jira aligned respective S C prime.

Thank you for being with us. Jesse and Devin. Jessie Pearlman has been consulting and dad Gyro space for over a decade. He has helped numerous organizations achieve agility from the team to the enterprise.

Jesse now leads the jira aligned practice that encompasses over 30 years of aggregated enterprise agility in jira aligned experience. So Jesse, thank you so much for being here with us today. And then we have Devin, and there's some with us. He has spent the last 20 years in product management, in Agile minded organizations, including roles as head of chief product officer, and head of product at multiple high growth companies. Since joining C Prime to lead the Product Coach teen, he has worked with companies in many market segments of many different sizes as they transition to an Agile product mindset and delivery. Jesse and Devin, it is an honor to have you with us. We're grateful for you to take the time to share your expertise of our global audience today.

Morning. Good day. I should say thank you everyone. Really appreciate being here with Devin. Have this opportunity to have this conversation with you.

Good morning everyone.

Well Jessy, I'm really excited about this as Devin. It's a good opportunity to talk about what jira align and I'm just gonna briefly take a moment for those who don't understand what Jira line is.

Laskin's Jira alignment, software solution that's designed specifically to help enterprises scale their agility and bring about that visibility. That's critical to continuing their transformation or in a healthy fashion learning. How to better make those decisions to pivot or persevere. And really be able to deliver the right value to the market at the right time, using the visibility and the traceability that the software provides. What we're going to be doing today, Devin, is talking about how what, you know, all of that product agility experience that you're bringing to bear. And what Drew a line can do with it. So when we start talking about this, one of the first things that we poses is this understanding of this statement. Why half of the S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next decade. Now, Devin, I know that this is a bit of a passion point for you.

You know, it's really interesting.

A lot of times down in the execution layer, a lot of people are like, why are we getting pushed so hard? Why are we having so much discussions about being faster, delivering things, you know, it's quicker to market, etcetera.

It really starts all the way at the boardroom.

And the reason being is there's so much pressure on an organization to stay relevant, is a term, but really to stay as a leader in this space, and to provide the best solutions possible.

And in the boardroom, there's this pressure to innovate. There's pressure to release, you know, release value to market very quickly to delight your customers and be different and NPS score and whatever, all these different things are. Right?

But it comes down to is that there's also the challenges, the challenges of culture, the challenges of organizational inertia, to be able to start moving faster and differently.

And so it's not just about, hey, Let's go implement a new process important.

But also, let's implement an ecosystem, a whole way of thinking differently. A different mindset for the organization, which starts with why.

It's true. And it'll go ahead and, and go forward, Jesse.

So in order to do that, it really comes from starting at the top. And starting at the top, what I mean by that is, we have to make a decision at the leadership level, that we wanted to do things differently.

And we want to close that gap.

By doing so, we want to close the gap between corporate strategy, what we're trying to do, and link it to product execution.

And one of the most important things about closing that gap and making sure that everybody's working in the same direction is having us focused on products, rather just on projects so that we're delivering value.

one of the challenges to that Jesse is when you start linking those things together.

one key part of that is is the creation of that invisibility of how everything links together. And so I'm really excited today because, Jessie, you're gonna show us not, we're not going to just hop theory, we're gonna actually show implementation to degree, at least enough to make people interested. Right? It's true.

You know, listening to everything that you just had to say, Devon, I'm working with not one, but two very large financial organizations right now that are struggling with this very thing.

There's multiple set of what we could call transformations that are taking place to ensure that they're getting everything that they need from the culture, from the organization, from the people. And there's a lot that goes into it.

And it really is about narrowing that gap and understanding that rich radiant value of strategy. Now, we had a webinar series over the course of the summer about Lean portfolio management. And one of the things that we talked about in there was really making your strategy visible, how you do that inside of ... Portfolio Canvas.

Every one of your organizations out there right now, you're all doing this, you're capturing your strategy to some degree, but you're not capturing it in a coherent and cogent and single place where it can be radiated. Now, inside of ... we have an object called the Portfolio Canvas. The canvas allows the portfolio that value stream to identify what they're really intended to do. Why we exist? What is it that we're? What is it that we can spend to accomplish? Those things that we're trying to do? Now, if this within this particular portfolio, this fiscal digital services, they're trying to deliver what they already have on the market while bringing the next generation offering to really provide a larger value set from individual users, SMBs. All the way to other corporations.

So the budget is needs to be robust enough to provide for those values that this portfolio is intended to deliver. Then we talk about, well, what's the scope and the value stream? Well, if we're going to be delivering this value, who, within our organization will be delivering, what elements of that value will they be delivering? And we can break that apart here. Now, we can see we're clearly, too far, the o.k.r.s, and deliver, so now we start talking about what were these are the values that we're going to deliver, how are we measuring those values? What is it we're actually going to put on the market? And, inside of jira, align those o.k.r.s have a rich and vibrant visibility in life inside of the system to start to say from the highest concept of what you're trying to do. Whether that's improved customer satisfaction or optimize your operations or whatever it might be all the way down to enhancing your chatbot response times, it's all connected to that larger value, and you need to understand how well you're progressing against it. That pivot or persevere, decisioning.

And so we also talk about the roadmap that then says, if these were the values and this is how it's supposed to be delivered, what are the timeframes and what will the work be that actually deliver that value and the critical points within it. And we can represent that with this, with a series of roadmaps inside of your line, that speak to the totality of the Enterprise and the Fiscal Services that you're trying to deliver, as well as the specific products that those fiscal services are being delivered through.

So we have this rich radiant value of the strategy. We really start to refine it down to a point where we can get that business model canvas, or that clear understanding that you're shooting for refining these ideas down to those specific choices.

I like that. So I'd like to kind of explore these.

Let's go and explore how we go about doing that. And the first part of that is, how do I take a really big idea, you look at this and it's kinda think of this as the spot tunnel, lot of you might be familiar with, like a double Diamond. But it's all about converging, converging to product choices.

And I would say, not just to get to a backlog of execution, but to get to a backlog of discovery and learning. So that allows us to have that agile mindset to be able to pivot.

And to learn in the market. Because guarantied day one, when we start something, we don't know everything we need to know.

Right? So we need to be able to allow for that discovery. So the first thing that I think about as we're doing this, is how do we verify and move forward?

And in order to do so, go ahead and hit the next slide.

We want to make sure that we establish that we're all on the same idea. So at C prime, one of the things that we do is, we have this very proven framework that we work with, individual companies, et cetera, in establishing.

So, I'm gonna take you through a little bit of this, and Jessie's gonna show us how, when we do this, it actually goes into a tool, so that we can actually work on it.

Now, here's an example that we don't need to go into detail about it, but the first thing we started out with is, framing the idea you could think of this as a light business canvas.

Yeah, there's a lot of ways you can think about this, but it's supposed to be something that, in a short period of time, a group of people can get together, discuss an idea, and make sure that they're on the same page. In this example, the idea is, Hey, I'm a banking institution. I want to make sure that I am actually capturing the value of the children, or the offspring of my my current clients or members. And I want to make sure that they use my services.

So it's just the idea around an app around how do we make it to where it's easy to be able to pay and reward kids for chores and teach them educational purposes.

So if I had something like this, Jesse, and then I wanted to capture this as I'm discussing of the group in jira, so that way, it can be shared, rather than just on a whiteboard somewhere.

What is the way that is most proficient or Indira align? Not jira, Let's be very airline. Thank you. Get out there and they work together. So it's excellent that you brought that up. They actually pair together so that teams are working in jira and that you're really trying to pursue the strategies and those values in jira Ally leaving the teams relatively undisturbed in their ecosystem.

But inside of Jira line, we have the Business Model Canvas now Devin, I didn't represent the exact same product, but you were speaking to the family tour. What I have is some others that would be driven from this, right? There might be, you know, check scanning apps, or voice trading that might be driven out of this to help the family, the father, the son, the mother, whatever. Do their fiscal planning, the way that they're trying to get it done. So, inside of jira line, we have these business model canvas that really allow us to bring in what is it we're trying to do. What are those personas. We're trying to solve the problems for, identifying those problems, talking about the competitors who might be the landscape that we have to work again. And this allows the product managers to really create a very robust understanding of their product, and drive the right values. For research, feedback loops, ROI, metrics, everything that you need from a product, really.

And this business model canvas inside of your align gives you the ability to radiate that information. Once again, the value prop, the barriers and challenges. Who are the customers that you're actually serving with this? What is the description of the value in the business model that you're delivering, those personas that you have.

And, the competitors, now, the customer's personas and competitors, are actually objects inside of jira line. They're very robust.

I didn't want to go into too much detail, but you can create very clear pictures of a young entrepreneur who might be looking to utilize some of those product values out of that new suite that's being developed for the family. This young entrepreneur could be the oldest son in this family who's looking to take his little concept and make it more more, more viable on the market. And is seeking ways of getting funding and managing his finances in such a way as to be able to pursue that business. And then competitors, who are the people that you're actually in competition with? What are there? What are their product offerings? And where does your product compared with a directly, what are those land mines and opportunities that your sales organization can take advantage of or look out for when having those conversations in sales against those competitive landscapes.

So the Business Model Canvas gives you all of this rich information to really drive all of this. Now, Deven, there's a question about who should be involved when we start creating all this information? Yeah, I love that, you asked that question, because, as you're talking through that, sometimes we can get kind of caught up in the artifact, the fact that we've documented it.

I want to stress that the most important thing, and what Jessie just took us through, the discussion, and if the discussion is important, then you need to make sure you have the right people in that discussion.

So anytime, if we're going through this process, be thinking to yourself, OK, But I'm going to engage my team if I'm going to engage people in this discussion. I need to make sure that there's people there that understand three things. one, is it usable?

Is what I'm going to bring to market, something that's usable, Who can represent the different people, then, and understand how they're going to be using it.

Second, is valuable.

Is there value to this service? Will people pay for it?

Will they see a value, whatever that definition of value is for you and your organization?

And then the third is feasible.

This is sometimes where we wait a little bit too long to bring someone in to understand if it's feasible, feasible, meaning isn't doable.

And it's not necessarily with the idea of of how are we going to go do this? Because what we just, when we went through that frame, what we identified is, Why are we doing it?

What are we doing, and who are we doing it for?

Not how yet, right? But we need people to be able to raise their hand and say, Hey, look, the way you're going, this is not something that's feasible for us to do. So, key key people that have involved in those processes. Devin, when we talk about this from the ... perspective, we're really talking about that scaling, Agile framework, whatever it might be, whether that's safe, dom, less, You're talking about representatives. There's the feasible, which is what is technically possible to a certain degree. So you're gonna bring begin. You're going to be bringing in your developers and your architects to have the right conversations about technical stuff. Usability. This is where your product ownership is really talking about. This is the usable functionality we start to understand is possible and probable through this software set, and the valuable is really the business element. Is it fitting within the start larger strategies of this product?

And it's offering on the market, because just because it's usable and feasible, doesn't mean it's actually valuable to the larger market. And I think this is what you're driving towards, is really understanding in your organization.

Who's bringing the right level of conversation for the right level of value that's intended to be delivered to the market?

So, when we think about this, again, we have this product vision. that's now being driven when we have those right people in the conversation, we now understand, truly, what's feasible, what's usable, and what is valuable. So the product vision allows for clear product objectives to be set. We know what the product is. We know the values route to pursue.

And then it helps keep those product managers laser focused on those to be delivered on any given horizon. As well as keeping those who are in delivery, aware of what the value is that they're intended to be delivering. so that when they're writing the stories and they're working on the details, they know that they can deliver that value technically.

And it has that usability to match what the value is intended to be.

So when we look at this, one of the elements here might be become number one in interactive voice trading. So while I'm driving down the road listening to my my radio broadcast about radio, how old MI, either a podcast or some other streaming immediate about my financial information and I want to make a trade. I can quickly get on my app without having to disrupt my driving experience and have a trade take place. So, number one, value is, deliver top, sorry, deliver top quality, voice solutions to enable consumers to conduct banking transaction using voice.

But, there are other values. This is the primary value.

Well, we want this to be seamless, works on any device, across all carriers. Maybe in the future, we want some facial recognition So that it's easier to access the equipment to access the app.

Photo, 200% improvement in handwriting recognition for, right? So, it's easier to capture photos, simplicity, entire experience. We're starting to see that. It's not just one thing we're pursuing.

It is one thing and a radiant set of values that support that one thing in a rich way so that this product really has an impact to the market.

When we have the right voices, we get the right outcomes, when we have that. And now, we really have to start mapping our way to that.

So, Devin, let's talk about telling your product story and keeping it top of mind.

You know, to kinda going back to what you're just saying. Just for a second. What I love that you're capturing in jira line, so many organizations that we work with begun to say, OK, well, do you know your product, mission, vision, goals, that upset?

And the answer almost always is yes.

The next question is, let's see it. Right. And, Oh, well, and then there's a pause.

There's a look for it, there's, you know, all those different types of things, And I'll find that, a lot of times, maybe the leader knows there's a mission and vision and goal, but the teams don't.

So having a product like jira line, where it links those things together, and that you can see what you're driving to be able to drive towards that product vision is super critical. Now you might be asking yourself, well, wait, product vision after idea, chicken, and egg.

You know, if you already have a product vision, then your ideas that you're framing will naturally flow from it. Sometimes it's that first product idea that helps drive your product vision. So just kinda keep that in mind.

And we learned, is that right down visions evolve? So you may start at one place, we're continually refining it and that vision still needs to be radiated broadcast to some degree.

Yeah, very true. So, once you have that idea, the next phase of that, after, you know, you know, who? It's for why we're doing it.

What it is, is to start to understand how we want the user to experience it, and, you know, for those of us that are old enough to remember radio. These sticky notes on the wall and different type things, In fact, I love those days, because as someone walked by and sticky notes, fell off the wall, that was how we were the scope, right. But, but today, we're lucky enough to have tools and solutions that allow us to be able to capture digitally, which is important, as we all are joining from different locations throughout the world.

How do you do it to where we can support, they, the at home model, or remote office, et cetera? And so, that's where I really like about what we can do with the tools live today.

As we look at this, I'm thinking this will be familiar to most of you, but the idea is we want to map out that story of the experience. I have an activity, I'm a kid, I want to be able to see what the chore is. I have a goal of doing a chore and then I have a goal of being paid. Those are maybe the three activities that I'm interested in right with the app that I talked about earlier.

Or maybe as a parent. I want to be able to create a list.

I want to be able to want to be able to create a list. I want the kid to be able to look at it. And then I want to be able to verify that. They've actually done the work, and then I want to pay the kid.

So, go ahead and go to the next slide. So, in this world, what's interesting, is, what we want to do is not only just create the story map, but remember, we're trying to convert. We're trying to prioritize.

So, by breaking these activities up, and finding pathways of, OK, well, what does it look like for a parent to create a list?

What does it look like? Go ahead and click. I think there's a few builds on the slide.

Jessie, just click until it goes to the next one, then come back. But, as you can imagine, you know, the first one, I think, that's good, You've got the activity of creating a list. You've got the second section of the activity of verifying that the Kid has, or that really did the chore and then the next one being pay.

Now, what's interesting as we start to do this, is we can start to capture this in a tool that then we can prioritize and help people be able to do the work, right?

It's true that Jesse.

So inside of jira line, once again, we can build these journeys, their story mapping, and there's feature mapping. So we can build from the bottom-up, or we can build from the top-down. When we do this, we have the ability, and anyone who's familiar with mapping, you've got your grids. What is it that you're really trying to focus within the grids?

This one we've got as an example, if there is a group of people we're trying to serve with this product. They might be within the product management organization. It may be trying to monitor a thing within the product management organization. Whatever that thing now is, here, we can see it's in testing.

So, we understand, we need monitor for this PM group, and we've created the feature that's going to do that. Very thing. And we can even see how many stories are associated to it, And we can see where it tightens its life cycle. So we know that this journey is live and active, and we can start to review, as things are completing that value delivery. But we drive down a level and we say, the story mapping allows me to take a specific persona for an individual, radical, and talk about the administration of time that she might need to work on.

And here, we have a story that has been accepted, that's driving up into the larger journey, because radical works within the PM. That administration works within the monitoring area. So, now, we're starting to see how the system can create. And let me, let me, let me tell you, you can have as many journeys as you might want inside of jira aligned to fulfill whatever product offering, you're out to capture. And this is a great way of really working with your teams and organizations to drive what those journeys are, intended to be, bringing those, right people together again, Devon, to make sure it is the right thing. It's usable, feasible and viable.

Know what I like about what you just showed us, so many times, as we're trying to convey what's being done, we convey it in work.

Right. And here, what we're doing is we're switching that discussion.

We're switching the fact that what we're doing is we're actually tracking the delivery towards events towards user centered value.

And the other thing that's really great about it is we do story mapping and prioritization at what we'll call the journey levels, is that allows us to be able to prioritize where we want to learn.

For example, in the scenario that I said, where, where as a parent I can put in the chores, I can verify that the kids have done it and I can pay.

I'm probably not going to need to do a lot of research around pay. I probably have a pretty good hunch how that works.

I probably have a pretty good hunch of how to create a list, but maybe it's the verification, like, how am I going to verify the kids, What does it mean for a parent to verify. Do I require them to take a picture and log it and send it wherever? I don't know what that looks like, but at the end of the day, that might be the area I need to learn from First.

Well, why would I start from left to right?

Let's start in the middle. Let's start with where we need to discover.

Because if I discover that that is not something that's solving a problem, I sure would have hate to build pay, because I can't differentiate on pain, know, something like that. So it's all about finding the areas where you're going to differentiate, where you need to learn, and starting the work there incrementally.

We talk about MVP, minimum viable products.

Let's shift that mindset.

Let's shift it instead of minimal viable products that shifted to minimal viable learning.

Of what can we learn to be able to pivot and deliver the right things. Deven more and more.

With every client I work with, the more I watched the industry, everyone is moving towards value. It's really about what is being delivered. Hasn't been valuable. O.k.r.s are the big rage right now. Everyone's moving towards understanding the value that they're intended delivering.

How to measure that in a very robust and realistic way. But it is the learning that we get. It is all feedback loops. And if your strategy, and I come back to this again, if your strategy is made visible, if you have software that radiates it in a way that every level of your organization starts to understand the value that's intended to be delivered, you start with those learning points at every level! Because those people understand where the risks are greatest for the value that you're pursuing. And want to ensure that they minimize those risks first and foremost to validate that the value can be delivered or to inform the organization at every possible level of feedback that it has, That this is not a thing that can be pursued. It is not feasible. It is not valuable or it is not usable. Let's pursue that and then we get those learnings that you're speaking to.

Yeah.

So, we always put all this stuff in there, right?

And the next thing, so we've taken it done. So, we've taken, and we've narrowed all these choices, we've gotten the product choices, we've prioritized our ..., MVPs, minimal viable learnings, minimum viable products. Whatever you want, with prioritize all this stuff, we're gonna go after.

Well, the next thing that happens is someone comes along and says, hey, I need a roadmap, Right? And not only a roadmap, but I need to see progress towards it, et cetera. Tell me a little bit about as we execute and create these things, what it looks like. And what I mean by that is, if you go to the next slide, you know we've gone through we've identified these journeys.

And the great thing about that is each of those journeys is comprising the line going through of stories.

So essentially, I can create a roadmap that says these are the order of the journeys.

I'm going to start with the journey of verifying my kids have done the chores, and then the story. Is there anything? Then I'm gonna go to the next journey or whatever those are, right? And as I identify those, I've got my backlog.

Now, for anyone that's pretty logical, that you look at that and you say, OK, well, if someone needs a roadmap, you turn it on its side.

You put a time frame around it, and I warn you that the more predictable you need to be on your roadmap, the less efficient you are as an organization of delivering.

I had a great call the other day with a client.

They're like, well, we need to be 80% efficient and 20% predictable kind of in that scale.

And I love that answer because 20% predictable gives a little bit of fluidity into, OK, we don't be exact, so we don't spend all this time figuring out how long it's going to take. But you can see that there's different ways of showing this roadmap and looking at it.

What does that mean for me in jira Aline?

Instead of creating some PowerPoint presentation, that I've got 50 different versions and some gun old, and I hope there's no spun differently for different clients, or partners, or whatever. And all of a sudden, that goes to chaos, and I've committed everything under the sun, and change 50 million times.

How do I make it to where it's not static? but more dynamic?

To Caroline is, perhaps the single best product on the market that I've run into for a very robust roadmap that allows for strategic road mapping, one plus years, all the way down to the near term road mapping. What am I doing in the next quarter? And how are the stories lining up in their sprints to ensure that we're getting that value delivery that we're looking for?

So, zero line provides that strategic roadmap value, which is much like a portfolio canvas, This all ties back into radiating Everything general line is one of the single best information radiators on the market for this purpose. I would not have spent four years of my life with this product so far if it were not so good at what it does. So, we have the strategic roadmap which is a lot like that portfolio canvas. It's informing the organization to the strategic value, to be delivered in the next year plus. It gives be strategic themes in portfolio epics. These are work objects inside of Jira line.

The strategic team is intended to map strategy, basically, 1 to 3 years, and then the portfolio ethics are those half year to two years bodies of work that are intended to deliver those large pieces of value to the market. The near term roadmap shows where those strategies have been broken down into a roadmap that extends into the current program, incremental quarter of delivery, and possibly its predecessor, those portfolios of Ethics and Program Epics.

The roadmap really is intended to be not just a place in which you set your strategy, not just a place in which you might see progress against your strategy, But it is a place in which you learn about the impacts of yesterday, What we did not get accomplished, how that's hitting today's value to be delivered.

And what that's going to do, to tomorrow's value that you're trying to deliver, this doesn't have to do with predictability, but it does have some sense of doing efficiency where we're capable of delivering what we committed to in the period of time that we thought we would. If we weren't able to, did we understand that we're wanting to able to, and that was OK. Or is this going to cause us to push work into this period of time that we had hoped to deliver a different set of values from?

This is critical information, And the Roadmap does all of that, and it even allows you to focus on a product level, all of that talking without showing a thing as bad, bad practice.

But I cannot spend enough time on the roadmap inside of jira aligned to show you all of its rich value. But this is a screenshot of it, that says, right now, for this digital services, this portfolio that is delivering digital services for this financial institution.

in this current period of time, this quarterly delivery that they're doing, they're focused on what's associated to the mobile apps suite. And that mobile apps suite has a variety of other product lines underneath it.

And this is all the work that's being delivered.

On this screen, we see different colors. We see dark, green, and light green. This cryptocurrency exploration payments and transfers. We can see its progress to date, what's left to be done, and we can tell by its color that it's healthy.

Here, the the Update Mobile App UI is at risk of delivery.

We should have a conversation about what that is. I can open that record up and look at any discussions on that record to understand why that might be and to speak to any impacts. I can see where milestones are intended to be delivered. So, when this next generation chatbot needs to hit the market by a specific point, I can see where those are intended to be delivered.

I can see the sprint's, I can see the timeframes.

This really starts to paint a routine information of where we're at.

Are we capable of delivering on time?

Do we need to shift this value out if we need to shift this value out, what impact does that have on the next program increment, et cetera, et cetera. So not only does it radiate your data, you're really it's the data that you're really interested in, your product lines and it gives you the timeframes that you might be interested in from near too far.

So, Devon, this is what the, the, the roadmap doesn't, again, that's the milestone me. getting ahead of my own build on the slide.

Passionate about this. But this is where we want to talk about how work needs product inside of guerrilla and all of this is great.

But you have to understand, for that Roadmap to work, there's data that has to be put onto the record for the product, information to be carried into the roadmap. There's information that needs to be carried into the object record. So, the features and stories are where we carry that information, and product, product, objectives, customers, and personas on the feature record.

We can see, it's supposed to provide intelligent, assisted chatbot. We can see that it's part of the mobile apps suite. If there were product objectives, we would see the product objectives on this.

The story that's associated to this feature has a persona for the mobile banker. So, this Hadoop migration of database, though, it sounds like nothing.

All to do with that chatbot: has everything to do with the data being available for that chatbot to be accessed. And, we know that this value goes back to that mobile banker.

So, this is how the system pulls this together, so that, on that roadmap, when I say, show me the mobile app suite, that's how it gets all that data in place.

So now, Deven, I've shown you kind of the journey of how jira line is taking Everything that you were speaking to previously, how we narrow the focus from an idea, which we really didn't get into in jira line, has.

Oh, there's so much deven Drew a line does, from an ideation perspective all the way through all of its product.

Functionality that we've been speaking to, the framing, the personas, the competitors who are the right people all of this gets brought together inside of jira line in this product? Through the the from the from the canvas to the backlog.

Everything gets pulled together from this product, information off of those features and stories and brings it into the this product room, and this is where the product journey becomes visible. The product manager has the ability to really review and the product owners. Start to understand where their contributions are feeding. So you say would you say this is?

For those of us that have not been doing ...

for four years, for those of us that aren't going to live in the solution ourselves, I'm thinking of directors and thinking and product managers. To me, this is where it all comes together, where I can have, like, a dashboard or a view into the information without having to be an expert of every little niche and set.

This product is one of, I would say, four key views, but from a product specific perspective, this is the primary view that jira line has and it gives us the product room, and it starts to say, here are those personas. Whoops.

In my mouse, here are those personas that we're focusing on for this particular product. This is the mobile apps suite. So this is everyone that's going to be involved in there. This is what we have in delivery, the top features in the Backlog that are supporting this very product suite. And then we can see, what are those product objectives? There's that voice, facial recognition, photo and simplicity. And then we can see effort versus value. We can see where the effort, story points of delivery have been consumed, and the value has been measured against that delivery.

And then we can see theme distribution, because your products may be delivering value across more than one strategic theme. So now we can start to see where the mobile suite is impacting across multiple themes of distribution.

Then lastly, what we have is this effort distribution that says either by persona or product objective, how are we delivering? And in what releases will that be dropped into the market.

All of this exists with inside your own mind which really gives exactly the view that any product organization wants and the ability to radiate value back to the organization about product progress.

Devin.

Fantastic. We've, we've, we've touched on everything. I think I've met every ask that you had about a product agility focus inside of jira along. Let's see what we have from everyone else, as far as questions may go at this point in time.

Jessie and that fantastic presentation that you cover a lot here, and that we have a number of questions that have popped up while you're presenting, and one of the, let me bring my camera back on here. one of the key questions has to do with governance. You know, what is what? What is behind a successful deployment of this vision?

What are the roles and responsibilities that you need to have front governance perspective to make sure that this is working? That you have, That you're getting the most value out of the, out of the application?

So governance is always a question that every financial institution asks when they start working with .... There's a variety of places in which governance can be met. Compliance can be met. There's robust audit logs throughout the system, but the primary place is really by creating what we call a portfolio con Bon view, where we can start to show what all of the criteria are, those thresholds and barriers that need to be met. In order for this work to one, get funded and to meet all those compliance and regulatory requirements that exist on the market.

So jira line allows every organization to map exactly what their life cycle process might be and those exact details that they need to hit from compliance from governs all the way down the board to those internal requirements that they have for them, their own internal compliance governance.

That's that's excellent. However, I think that the question is more about internal governance for implementation.

It's more about, you know, how do you make sure that the, that, you know, who are the key, you know, owners for was March of the actual implementation, right? My apologies. So. Governance of the platform itself. As a whole other thing, jira lines a significant investment that any organization is going to make the moment you do that, and I've been working with organizations now for three years and telling them the same thing you need to have the following people involved.

It's not a tool, you don't give it to your admin admin team and just walk away from it. You want your administrators involved. Yes, they may own the tool technically, Yes.

But they're there to say, just like Devin spoke about earlier, what's feasible technically with the platform so that when you're process folks, your coaches, the ones who say this is the best way to do our work, to deliver the value.

Say hey, is it OK if the teams do this? Or if the product owners do this or the product managers do this, the administrators say, yes, you can do that, or no, you can't do that.

But more importantly, that third voice is the value voice. It's the business voice, it's that representative of the stakeholder, the business stakeholder who purchased the thing to make sure that the investment is actually delivering.

So they're there to say, does that match the value of why we purchased this? Does that match the value of the strategies we're trying to deliver? What does that process work for our needs?

And, does the technology support that process for our needs?

And, if that, if any one of those three saying no, then you have a conversation about what is the best way to government, that thing moving forward? Technically, it can't support that. Maybe we have a process that's external to the platform.

But we talk to Atlassian about bringing that product value into the platform. Because it needs to be internal to the tool.

So, this is how we start to talk about what your relationship, not just with the software, is, but with the software provider. Now, your partner becomes a different voice in there to say, to technical and other elements. Yes, process, you can do this, technically, you can do that with the product conversation. We start to help inform, you decline, back to Atlassian about what is the right value to put into the platform for your needs, as it fits the industry. And other other others who are in the market, seeking those same values.

When you see successful implementations, what type of partnership do you see? with the more technical folks and the and the business roles themselves? You do have a steering committee that's looking over this implementation.

Do you have process owners, data owners, product owners, who have distinct roles? Talk us a little bit about what that looks like. So what we're really talking about is that your organization starts to develop what we consider a Center of Excellence, or Lean Agile Center of Excellence. Whatever your organization is seeking for.

You have those people who are representing your product organization, and it's not just the large sense of product. You have the product owners, product manager, you may have a scrum master involved in there for process. You may have a Release Trade Engineer involved the process. You may have a solutions architect.

You may have a portfolio member in there. These are the people that you want in, in and what they're doing is, they're radiating that best value. So, it works like this. You implement ... that, partnership with those who are implementing You, have a stakeholder team that's going to represent and carry that body of knowledge. What your practices, what your taxonomy is, What your work objects are, how your work is organized? When you have all of that in alignment, then very quickly working with your partner? You can get the implementation in. If you're not so sure about things, then we can bring the consulting to bear to help bring that best practice for you and put it in place.

Once it's in place, we educate and train your organization, and that stakeholder team that's been put together to represent, the portfolio, the programs, and the teams from administrative, process, and business.

We give them the training, and we start to help organize what that Center of Excellence might look like. That Center of Excellence, then builds communities of practice that radiate that value back out to the organization. These become feedback loops that bring back that best practice to say, this isn't working in the system, so, well, is this a defect? Or is this a process change? Or is this what?

And this starts to radiate back into your center of excellence that then gets communicated either to the partner, to say, hey, we're having problems understanding this. Or to the software provider to say, we need this product to be improved XYZ, or we have this defect that's open and we need this close as quickly as possible because it's impacting our utilization of this, of this platform.

You know, and you just say, look up leveling and just a little bit because we've kind of dug into the idea of these tools. Remember in the beginning we talked about is the challenges around culture.

The challenge is around inertia within that, within the company, of doing things in a certain way.

So, a lot of times, what we'll see is when people are looking for another tool, they're trying to solve a lot broader problems, and just put a tool can provide.

And a lot of times, those changes will come from a segment of the organization that hasn't necessarily got bought and buy in from the rest of the organization. It might be product operations, it might be whatever Oregon part of the organization is trying to solve that.

We've seen this already with the implementation of the products like Jira.

or, and when I say jira, I do major it with the engineering organizations, implement solutions.

Then, who's left out?

I live this world, right, as a product focused, focused person. Engineering! Decided to go to agile engineering, Decided to start using jira and I'm just gonna, I don't even know that, That means to me, and I don't want to live, Jira was not designed for me as a strategy person.

Jira align closes that gap.

What I love about this is now there's a framework that we can come in and teach organizations, and how to work together, in a natural way, how to transition the why all the way through the organization, and the people who are doing the work.

But then also, the tools that support the visibility into that jira line. To me, it was designed for me as a product person. I can do the strategy. I can do all those different types things, right?

Now, I have a home, I can put the information in, but not only that, it's not a dead end, because it connects to what engineering calls their home, and it all connects. And so, it's an ecosystem of being able to see the value that we're working on.

And I think a lot of times, that brings the organizations closer together, rather than, Oh, we need a new tool, because you're not doing what I need. Right? The, the framework, and the coaching. and training, along with it is so critical.

It is, and, and, and, and I want to lean into it, and you'll notice that you really touched a passion point here. This is representative of the transformation itself.

Every time we do an implementation, it's a representation of a transformation, because we're requiring, and we're asking, bringing business and technology together. Always bring business and technology together, always. You can't have the right conversation, if you don't have the right voices in the room.

If I just talked to technology, I will get a skewed view of what they need and deliver that, and that will not fit the values of the business that that Devin is looking for, that strategy.

If I just focus on what the business needs, then the technical cannot get what they need, because it doesn't make any sense to them, it doesn't have a translation of any value. We bring them together.

And we have very clear conversations about the pain that both sides have with the other, and we work towards resolving them, to bring it together, to say that there's a process by which you can state value, understand the technical ability, and deliver together on the market.

Yeah, doesn't say there's a fantastic discussion, is exactly what the theme of the main questions that have been and the answer go a step further. And maybe just to validate what you have already said, a lot of our examples are on the product context. Is, Can we use this?

Where there is no product development involved at all where we're looking at maybe process development and they're really just looking to online, you know, tactics with key strategist for the organization. I just wanna hear from you directly on that.

This is where it always begins.

Organizations grow organically, and by that they grow with each element finding its own way. At some point, there is a unifying moment where we have to drive the strategy.

This always happens that we first connect the process. Let's, how are we doing it today. Forget the strategy. I just need visibility.

Most organizations have lost the visibility. So we drive the visibility and from the visibility, we start to say, now, we have the questions: why are you working on it this way?

What value is this actually producing? Does it tie back into the larger value stream? this changes the conversation.

Now, back to where it should be, the value of what you're doing and is it really the right thing and is it aligned the right way in your organization for the value outcomes you want?

Excellent. Excellent. Inevitably, when you start getting into these discussions about the process as it is or there is there is, there is a pretty systematic lack of ownership in organizations or processes, either Sometimes key processes, not only you lack the end to end visibility on an understanding of what that process is. Sometimes you'll have functional understanding, but not Andrew and understanding.

Worse yet, you have, sometimes you don't have any process on our clear process owner for that. Sometimes you have multiple process owners. will, may not see eye to eye. Tell us a little bit of how you navigate those waters, as you're going to organizations, trying to understand how they function. And you, and you get into this organizational hurdles which are less about, you know, the product and process.

It's more about the, you know, the key roles behind it. Any tips on how to navigate those waters?

Yeah, you're always go ahead though.

I was just gonna say, you know, when I think of processes, they exist to provide value, right, at the end of the day, there's some value that you're trying to create. And whether you value stream that and identify what that looks like and look for the delays and where the challenges are, and where the transitions are, etcetera. There's lots of different methodologies for being able to do that.

At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is identify where we can improve.

Where's the process failing or where is it strained, or where the delays or where? Is there a lack of ownership for transition?

So there's lots of different ways I would say to try and boil that question and figure it out. And that's where having season, coaches, everyone on our team has been doing this for many, many, many, many years in many different organizations.

And so the beauty of that, as well, as we come in, we can say, Hey, This is what we saw happen here, this is how it worked. This is the challenge they had over here, and we can bring it together.

Then, Jesse, from a jira line perspective.

This comes back to everything we've been talking about, there's an executive stakeholder who's driving a value, right? And this is really what we we pursue when we get into an organization from jira line. If no one holds a process, we start to say, who's your boss, who's your boss, who's your boss?

Let's go talk to your bosses. Who should own this process? Well, I should own this process. No, I should own this process. Why do you feel you should own this process? And we start to really separate where the value is actually coming from.

Get everybody to understand that this is what they really need to be focusing on in a healthy way. We don't go into this computationally, we say: you have a problem, you have a problem. Problem sounds similar though you're using different language.

Let's get to the root cause of the problem and really work on resolving that.

If an organization lacks an executive stakeholder who is driving this change, you will, you, we mean resistance, you will always have resistance because there's always going to be a struggle for dominance.

Remember, the organization grew organically.

Each feels that they have a critical reason for existing, because if there was a critical reason that brought their existence to bear, they're not ready to think about. Maybe that critical reason doesn't exist anymore, and there's a new way to provide value to the organization.

And this is really what we have to perform.

If we lack that executive stakeholder ship is getting everyone to understand the commonality of what they're all doing.

And the uniqueness of why things need to be different in certain places. But the value all must come together the right way.

I love that. Listen, we're out of time now. But I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna mention a couple of other questions that I couldn't I have time to, and then I'm going to ask for some help before we close. one, it has to do with value creation. A lot of times people in the lower levels of the organization have a hard time articulating value creation, how, what they do create value. So that's one question. And, and, and the other one has to do with the bringing stakeholders together for implementing something like this in an environment that is just kind of starting to do Agile.

And the third one has to do with that. It's a bit of a funny commentary. That technology is great, but also, technology can make stupid happen at the speed of light. And a lot of times, Agile was accelerating the wrong things, And how do you counter that? And I know you have wonderful answers for this. So here's my main question. How do I get our global audience that's on an hour right now, but also, the hundreds, if not thousands, who are going to be watching this video? What is the best way of contacting you directly to learn more about this?

I think we have a slide for that didn't, we didn't show that. The best way to get ahold of us is on LinkedIn. Let me go ahead and share my slide real quick, just for a moment, so perfect.

Go ahead and contact us on LinkedIn, and if we need to evolve the conversation into C prime, then we'll go ahead and share our contact information and carry that conversation where it needs to be. But please do reach out to us with your questions, We are more than happy to answer them for you. Thank you so much, for this time today.

That's wonderful. And less than to the audience, as well. We have jessie's and Evans length tagged on our posts for this conference. So just look at the people that we tagged there. They are the right at the beginning of the list for that, So you can connect with them directly. And even Pulse right there on the LinkedIn, Some of the questions that a lot of people are already doing that. So I'm sure they will do, if they see themselves tagged on a question they will check with, and that provide the answers for you. Jesse and Devin, thank you so much this flu by us. Thank you so much for taking your time to share your expertise of our global audience today. We're all very much better off as a result of that.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

You, ladies and gentlemen, Jesup Romain, and they venison with us, Devin Edison with us. What a wonderful presentation, and on bringing strategy, process product to gather, to accelerate value creation and innovation for organizations. Wonderful presentation. We're going to be wrapping up now, and we're gonna start back up at the top of the hour. So please take a break when we finish the session and log back on. At the top of the hour, we're going to be bringing you the senior leader of technology for TPG, and she's going to be focusing on productivity and connecting the dots with business process documentation. So meet us at the top of the Hour, with Elizabeth Thorner, Senior Leader of Technology at TPG. Thank you.

About the Author

Devin Anderson,
Product Strategy Coach,
Cprime.

Devin Anderson has been Chief Product Officer and Head of Product at multiple companies. As a product management leader for the last 15+ years, he has delivered enterprise IT solutions in endpoint management, endpoint security, and asset management totaling over $1B in sales. As a strategic product coach for Cprime he helps organizations be more strategic with their product teams.  He has coached and instructed companies across multiple market segments including security, hospitality, finance, government, software development, healthcare/pharma, education and many more.

About the Author

Jesse Pearlman,
Practice Lead - Jira Align,
Cprime.

Jesse helps organizations achieve true business agility by aiding them in applying Visibility into processes, practices, and market, to better understand their current state of Predictability and Responsiveness. Jesse enjoys the complexities of understanding systems and resolving root cause limitations to full performance and value.

Jesse has been an agilist and building high-performing teams since the mid 80’s. From learning the true elements of Servant/Leadership in the Marines, to refining his facilitation and mediation skills with Jean Tabaka at Rally, to facilitating the Agile success of hundreds of companies across the globe from the podiums of Rally and AgileCraft (now Jira Align), regularly refining the basics of scaling agile and what it takes to be successful.