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Product Governance Product Lifecycle Management

3 Ways Automation Helps Product Teams Meet PROD 4 and DDO

 

In recent years, product governance, also known as PROD 4 or DDO, has become one of the most critical areas for product leaders to manage and streamline.

For product-led businesses with existing on-market products or designing new innovative propositions, adapting a product, or updating pricing, it's critical to apply a robust product governance framework. In today's environment, product trust and providing fair value to your customers can significantly impact your brand and reputation and your growth outcomes.

But the detailed requirements and changes can mean months of work, preparation of annual product reviews, approval controls getting lost in email, and version control challenges. The effort required to achieve PROD 4 or DDO compliance can be resource-intensive - and often leads to gaps or not being implemented consistently across all products.

These challenges arise for product teams in start-ups up to large businesses. High growth companies may have resources to assign to product management and governance - however, the time spent is at the cost of less time spent on strategy and innovation.

For product teams, the key is to efficiently put in place product management and governance controls - not in the traditional way of slide decks, excel analysis, and meetings - but in an agile way using a simple but effective automated process without needing to code.

3 Ways Automation Helps Product Teams Meet PROD 4 and DDO Compliance Requirements

Automation is the essence of efficient and successful product management and governance framework, and here is how it helps product teams in start-ups up to large global enterprises today. It's fast gaining momentum in organisations around the globe, and is used to complement product teams to achieve optimal growth and revenue.

 

1) Streamlining process and ongoing management
As product teams introduce a product governance framework into their agile product development, you can add elements across each stage and include approval controls. The critical requirements for validating a product design, ongoing monitoring, and annual product reviews are available and selected with best practice examples.

With mechanical product design, monitoring, and reporting modules using 'drivers', product teams can establish their product governance and map it to all lifecycle stages to see approval processes and governance dashboard on product status and health. These reports and artifacts can be used as evidence, stored, and searched for when you need them.

 

2) Minimising approval burden
 

PROD 4 and DDO require reporting and accurate history of the complete product lifecycle. Product leaders need to schedule and report by collecting information and involving different stakeholders in reviewing and approving these product documents. This process can be time-intensive and often means you lose version control when other teams are involved and making changes to a product design TMS or TMD or BRD or annual product review.

Automation tools mean that a product design or annual review is created and moves through an approval status until it reaches final approval and becomes a published document. The up-to-date product information is easily accessed in the product workspace and can be reported in minutes. The product governance dashboard lets you view the critical governance metrics for a single product, a portfolio, or an entire organisation. You can easily see which products are at the design stage, how many product reviews are incomplete or overdue, and what risks have merged. This frees up time and allows you to focus on what you do best - innovation, strategy, and growth.

 

3) Improving product reporting

For product teams that have yet to implement a digital solution for their product management and governance PROD 4 or DDO and are still reliant on disparate systems, every product review is essentially a manual effort and inconsistent implementation.

It means that reporting is challenging to create and often starts from scratch or requires product managers to spend hours searching on shared drives.

The result of using automation for your product designs and ongoing monitoring and reviews is that it becomes streamlined and all in one place to see the history of the product and its lifecycle from launch approval through to actions that were set from annual product reviews.

 

Conclusion

While product governance is increasingly necessary today for all product teams, all too often, it's the product team's lack of time or old processes that cause it to be more time-consuming than necessary. Without modern product management and governance solution, groups are limiting their growth and increasing the chances of risk gaps emerging.

Product management and governance automation are flexible, intuitive, and easy to set up for product teams to meet the PROD 4 or DDO requirements. With solutions like Skyjed’s product management and governance platform, the product governance framework built-in, automation removes time-consuming meetings, manual report preparation, and time searching for the evidence when you need it.

Product teams can set up and import product document history in a few days and be ready to use workflows to report on their products' governance status and growth. To see how Skyjed automates up to 90% of your ongoing PROD 4 and DDO compliance, download our latest playbook below.

 

Download the Product Monitoring & Reviews Playbook

 

About Skyjed

‍Skyjed is a product lifecycle and governance platform. Skyjed's Ai-powered end-to-end product platform brings together every data point across the entire product portfolio into a single source of product truth. Skyjed was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and London the United Kingdom. For more information, visit Skyjed