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Communicating Business Value: The Superpower Of The Product Owner

Forbes Technology Council
Bob Davis
Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora, began his career as an engineer and now has more than 30 years experience leading high technology companies

With the rise of product-oriented teams that are increasingly focused on value, I'd like to direct a conversation toward those I'll call product owners. These are the people responsible for the entire life cycle of the product — its delivery process as well as its success (or failure). But how do they communicate the value of the product's impact, as well as the effectiveness of the software delivery process, to the CIO?

Understanding The CIO

We know that CIOs spend significant portions of their days organizing cost centers and optimizing processes to ensure they get the best possible value out of their budget. It's always been the prime mandate of the position. But as organizations transform, the CIO mandate has expanded beyond cost control and efficiency to include innovation and creating corporate value. Additionally, they typically have a tactical requirement to reduce their budget by a set percentage each year. The product owner's ability to communicate value to the CIO will be a function of how well they tie that value to the CIO's key initiatives. Without the right message, it's like shouting into the wind.

Having identified the burdens of the CIO, product owners should speak in a way that resonates with their concerns. The thing to understand is that CIOs can't care about every single thing. For a product owner to have a meaningful conversation with the CIO, they should speak in terms of key CIO initiatives. That means quantifying value delivered to the business in terms of revenue, cost savings and customer satisfaction while at the same time addressing cost ("Why is IT so expensive?") and software delivery velocity ("Why does IT take so long?"). At its most fundamental level, this is what any CIO wants to accomplish: reducing costs, operating faster and ultimately delivering value by improving customer experience.

Speaking The CIO's Language

For the most part, a CIO's focus on budget management has been dominated by infrastructure and vendor costs that make up a majority of most budgets. As software development has boomed, we've seen the benefits of catering to internal and external customers through on-demand software delivery. By having a complete view of the software delivery process, the delivery team can not only demonstrate the efficiencies, quality and governance of the process but also the value delivered to the enterprise in absolute terms and benchmarked against original expectations.

To do this, project owners need complete visibility into the software delivery pipeline to identify waste and bottlenecks and orchestrate complex value streams. They also need to understand the impact software releases have on a digital organization.

Generally, when these discussions occur at the level of DevOps engineers and agile practitioners, the talk is about KPIs in the area of quality, efficiency and speed. When CIOs are brought into the conversation, they want to hear about the strategic impact from cost savings, revenue generation and customer experience metrics.

However, these specific questions quickly become bigger-picture and turn into, "Did the product deliver on its promise?" and "Did we become better?" To determine those answers, development teams should address what they've produced and whether it achieved its strategic goals.

Proving Value To The CIO

The increased role of software — and, consequently, IT — has brought customer experience to the top of many CIOs' initiatives lists. It's the metric that ultimately determines if products deliver on their promise and if the company has delivered on its strategic objectives. The trap for product owners to avoid is thinking small. Many CIOs aren't directly concerned with things like MTTR or test automation; they want to know if they are delighting their customers and if they are growing their business. Again, CIOs can't care about everything every day, but they do care about whether they're better from the customer perspective.

So how do you measure value? Three important metrics to look at are the profitability of the product line(s), how well you are delivering on our strategic themes and customer satisfaction scores. Customer experience has become a significant priority with companies as a measure of business value, and this is driving the transition that all companies feel — that transition to becoming a software company.

From the CIO perspective, if infrastructure costs are under control and processes are optimized, examining dev comes next. As those teams find themselves increasingly under the microscope, they will have to deliver on success metrics that address customer satisfaction. This shift is enabled with an end-to-end tool-chain view versus a tool view.

Where It All Comes Together: Value Stream Management

When product owners talk to CIOs, it's important that they illustrate the impact they achieve in terms of cost savings, revenue and customer satisfaction. When talking to the CIO, it needs to be done in the context of key initiatives and how the product supports those. The way to do that in the software age is to identify and implement a value stream management solution that provides visibility into all three, from the idea of a product to the delivery — not only providing visibility into the entire life cycle, but determining if the intended value was delivered.

When researching a value stream management solution, IT managers need to make sure the solution focuses on providing the answers that CIOs demand — where money is being spent and how fast value is being delivered. The challenge is to find a single source of truth to monitor development. Most CIOs want to know there's full control being exerted over automating, standardizing and orchestrating complex releases to reduce risk. They'll generally value advanced KPIs, metrics and predictive analytics that continuously measure improvements.

The solution should ensure that governance and compliance policy adheres to every process. Ultimately, CIOs generally need to see that time to value is reduced through a complete view of the software delivery process, identifying choke points, eliminating waste and increasing efficiency, giving them a competitive advantage.

Having this information gives product owners the superpower needed to become strategic players in the business because the fact remains that all companies are software companies. Technology drives business value.


