Design and Distribution Obligations Checklist
by Leica Ison
Product Governance & Oversight Checklist for DDO
Product governance and oversight ensure that your customers' interests take on central importance throughout your product lifecycle decisions. We have designed a Chief Product Officer's governance checklist for setting out the processes and controls that help you design propositions and products that customers value.
This checklist is especially useful for implementing product governance to meet the requirements of ASIC’s Design and Distribution Obligations (DDO).
10 things to get you started.
☐ Create a Product Governance statement
Product governance should be embedded in your day to day operations and product team culture, with the importance set at the executive level and a Board level. Establish and document your product governance framework to ensure products perform as intended across the end-to-end lifecycle stages from testing propositions to launch and scaling.
☐ Create a Product Governance forum or team
Set a monthly governance forum and invite senior stakeholders and skilled business teams to implement your product governance. There should be input from all areas of the organisation, including but not limited to product development, product management, legal, regulatory, risk, marketing and sales and operations.
☐ Educate your Board, Leadership Team and Staff
Provide tutorials on product governance and the requirements to all staff members, leadership teams and your directors to ensure your organisation’s leaders understand your governance approach and how they are expected to be involved. Include this in a Change Management Plan and kick start the project with a launch communications plan.
☐ Map an end to end framework.
Product governance is end-to-end and should be used at every step of a product lifecycle. The product owner takes full accountability for the day-to-day management of the product from strategy setting, testing propositions to execution of growth plans and monitoring of review triggers. Handing products over from the development teams to operations is critical step to cover.
☐ Product monitoring and review
Set product monitoring with an annual calendar of product reviews that cover growth and compliance drivers. Ensure product reviews occur in a consistent review cadence and when a trigger events occurs eg customer complaints.
☐ Identify target markets
After you have set your product strategy define, set and document your target market. Map and assess your product features. The target market determination (TDM) should specify review triggers and distribution conditions. The TDM will also be assessed during your monitoring cadence. A negative target market or excluded customers, simply put, consists of customers whose specific needs are not met by the relevant product proposition.
☐ Define product distribution channels and strategy
A clear target market determination, distribution conditions and review triggers are a key part of distribution strategy along with accurate and up to date information about product proposition. Product monitoring and reviews also need to occur in all distribution channels and feedback into product owner.
☐ Product reporting & single source of truth
Develop a product reporting routine to ensure you are measuring product performance and that significant changes to product health and risk ratings are addressed. Record accurate product lifecycle decisions and monitoring reviews in a meaningful way to access and report.
☐ Identify key risk and improvement areas
Have you completed baseline review of your in scope products. This baseline review will identify gaps in your product governance and portfolios. Product risk assessments include an allocated target date to implement your growth and risk-mitigation actions.
☐ Measure effectiveness
Ensure you have a built for purpose governance platform like Skyjed to measure your effectiveness, teamwork and set timeframes to ensure your review your product governance framework. Product governance is an ongoing project – a journey that requires periodic assessment of your governance framework.
5 things to Avoid
Avoid just focusing on Target Market Determination and missing monitoring and reviews
Each organisation's products, risk appetite and culture are different. so set the product governance framework statement accordingly. Set a baseline and begin the journey to improve your product oversight. This goes beyond issuing a TMD. Being able to monitor and review and TMD and products is critical. The review process must be established as part of the product governance arrangements and controls should be put inplace to ensure that meaningful reviews take place.
Avoid just ‘ticking a box’ for the sake of compliance
Do not just do the bare minimum to become compliant on paper, go through the steps so everyone who is involved with your organisation is educated, aware and understands why this is important in business growth and continuity. The product management team will need to monitor and complete product reviews and a review of TMD in timely fashion.
Avoid silos or not involving your product management team
Make sure you make product governance a cross-function activity. Collaborate and build action plans across the end to end product lifecycle. A product strategy needs an allocated owner that can be handed over as people move roles.
Avoid leaving it too late
There are a lot of things that organisations need to do each year. Skyjed can help you get started early so you are not late implementing good product governance with our Customer Success onboarding framework across a 90-day implementation. Our platform includes real-time feedback of information from Distributor eg customer complaints and inbuilt monitoring, review triggers and reporting.
Avoid not having a governance platform
An effective governance platform is critical. Skyjed can provide you with a single source of product lifecycle truth and make the monitoring and review of triggers an automated task.
Getting product lifecycle management right is critical to success. If you want to find out how Skyjed can help improve compliance and strengthen your product with our AI driven platform, feel free to get in touch.
You might also be interested in our other blog posts: