List of initiatives under the Operations bucket managed by Product Managers
Usually, PMs spend a reasonable amount of bandwidth on ensuring the business continuity of the product & optimizing the cost of maintaining the same.
Let’s go through the list of initiatives which are part of the Operation bucket :
- Software COGS ( Cost of Goods Sold ): The cost incurred by the organization to deliver its solution to its customers. It is calculated as below :
- Data privacy compliance: It can include requirements such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Information Technology Act, or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
- Information security initiatives: It can encompass 2FA ( Two Factor Authentication ), biometrics-based authentication or Multi-factor authentication.
- Adhering to SLA ( Service Level Agreements ): It includes 99.999% uptime SLAs, adherence to technical support, ensuring heating and cooling standards, improving resolution time, response time, error rate, mean time to recovery and so on.
It’s a completely unfair task to compare these initiatives with user-facing enhancements & innovation. You can’t attribute revenue to any of the above initiatives. These are must have to operate the business in a compliant manner.
How to address Operation initiatives?
Usually, the team adopts one of the below strategies to take up these initiatives in a structured manner.
It can be done by allocating 30% of the engineering bandwidth towards operational initiatives. This can be done in any of the below combinations:
- Assigning 30% of Ops initiatives in each Sprint
- Dedicating every 3rd Sprint to Ops initiatives
- Restructure into 3 different teams with one dedicatedly working on Ops initiatives
It’s very crucial for PMs to include Operation initiatives in their Product Roadmap and align all the stakeholders so that there is clear visibility of the utilisation of the engineering bandwidth.
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