Product
Primary Goal: Quickly bring new products and features to market with an predictable price point.
Product groups manage the business or products of the organization, focusing on the value created by technology for the organization’s customers or stakeholders. Product Owners manage the business end of what the organization does, and work with Engineering to develop the applications or systems to deliver value through intelligent technology decisions. It is critical that Procurement have a good view into current and future technology usage forecasts, and provides key inputs to drive the priority of optimization work to the most valuable areas. Product teams will also provide the value component of unit economic metrics, enabling the mapping of technology cost to the customers, transactions, sales, or other business outcomes the organization experiences.
Objectives
- Accelerate product Growth
- Maintain or grow product margins
- Decrease time to market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, technology landscape
- Lack of visibility to granular cost data by feature or service
- Unpredictable cost changes when scaling products and applications
Key Metrics
- Revenue
- Product Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Cost per customer / Cost per product/feature
FinOps Benefits
- Manage risk
- Faster visibility to cost, allowing tradeoffs or earlier go/no go decision making
- Connect product decisions with business outcomes
- Predict how much technology infrastructure will factor into feature/ product price
- Guide team to make good technology investment choices
FinOps Product Persona typical roles:
- Product Analyst Analyzes data, conducts market research, and provides insights to inform product decisions and strategy.
- Associate Product Manager (APM) An entry-level position, often for those new to product management. APMs support product managers, conduct research, and learn the ropes.
- Product Manager (PM) This is the core role, responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition of a product or product line. They work with cross-functional teams and are often the voice of the customer.
- Product Owner In Agile environments, the Product Owner focuses on defining and prioritizing user stories, managing the product backlog, and working closely with the development team.