Part of my new role at ONS is to support* the Product Owner community of practice that is growing within the organisation. Part of the challenge here is that (a) we don’t quite define the role the same way as the rest of the agile universe (thus the name ‘Product ONSers’!) and (b) we don’t really have a common understanding of how we do define it other than it is a bit different (for everybody doing it.)

So I’ve been giving it some thought — how to create a shared understanding and a common set of actions and behaviours without getting prescriptive. Consistent not uniform as someone once said.

This is my first draft of what I hope will evolve in to something more a playbook** of sorts and it was shamelessly ‘inspired’ by two things.

The first was this great post by Brandon Chu MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager — 1,885 recommendations on Medium can’t be wrong.

The other inspiration — and something my slidedeck aims to be a companion piece to — is this presentation on ‘Being a Service Manager’ by Kit Collingwood-Richardson that has become the definitive description of the GOV.UK Digital Service Manager role →

Standing on the shoulders as they say.

Feedback gratefully received (there are all sorts of issues I’ve already spotted but ‘publish and be damned!)

* to be honest nobody really knows what this means — including me
** everyone has a playbook these days — I feel naked without one