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Why product governance is a hot topic right now. 

Product governance is a crucial topic for product leaders in today's landscape, where regulatory scrutiny and product regulations are rising. While the workload for product leaders is already demanding, the tools and frameworks for product lifecycle management and governance have remained stagnant for years. 

Adopting a modern product governance framework is essential to navigate these challenges and be at the forefront of product management. This article explores the importance of product governance, introduces Skyjed's approach and benefits, and provides actionable tips to help you get started.

The Significance of Product Governance: Product governance involves the active oversight of your products or product portfolio from inception to end-of-life. It encompasses processes, tools, and mindsets that set your organisation's product oversight standards. Governments worldwide have implemented product governance legislation to enhance consumer outcomes, align with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and address emerging environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks.

In highly regulated industries such as finance, more than 20 countries have enforced legislation that require organisations to establish comprehensive product governance frameworks and conduct annual product reviews. Regular product monitoring and assessments ensure compliance and enable strategic decision-making, giving your products a competitive edge and driving growth while prioritising customer satisfaction.

Challenges and Opportunities: The primary challenge faced by product leaders and organisations is operationalising their product governance framework and reviews to ensure compliance while effectively fostering product growth. Compliance obligations like Design and Distribution Obligations (DDO) in Australia or PROD 4 in the United Kingdom necessitate careful distribution and marketing of financial services and insurance products. Other examples include monitoring modern slavery in supply chains and addressing climate-related risks in product offerings.

Best Practices in Product Governance: Implementing best practices in product governance involves integrating the framework into day-to-day decision-making processes, including new product development and lifecycle management for in-market products. This approach ensures compliance, risk management, and customer-centricity are considered throughout the product journey.

A product governance framework is a structured and systematic approach to managing and governing products within an organisation. It provides guidelines, processes, and decision-making structures to ensure products align with strategic objectives, meet regulatory requirements, and deliver customer value. The framework encompasses various aspects of product management, including strategy, risk management, compliance, and performance monitoring.

Skyjed offers a comprehensive product lifecycle and governance platform and approach. Their approach involves several key elements:

1. Product Strategy: Skyjed emphasises the importance of defining clear product strategies aligned with the organisation's overall goals. This involves considering market trends, customer needs, competitive landscape, and regulatory requirements.
2. Risk Management: Skyjed helps organisations identify and manage risks associated with their products throughout their lifecycle. This includes assessing potential risks, implementing controls, and monitoring ongoing risks to ensure compliance and mitigate potential issues.
3. Compliance and Regulations: Skyjed assists in keeping track of regulatory changes and ensuring product compliance. They provide tools to monitor regulatory requirements, assess the impact on products, and implement necessary changes to maintain compliance.
4. Performance Monitoring: Skyjed's approach includes monitoring the performance of products against key metrics and objectives. This helps organisations evaluate product success, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions.
5. Collaboration and Communication: Skyjed emphasises the importance of collaboration and communication within product teams and across the organisation. Their platform provides a central hub for sharing information, engaging stakeholders, and facilitating cross-functional collaboration.
6. Continuous Improvement: Skyjed encourages organisations to adopt a culture of continuous improvement in their product governance practices. This involves regularly evaluating and enhancing processes, policies, and strategies to adapt to changing market dynamics, customer preferences, and emerging risks. By continuously learning from feedback, analysing data, and seeking opportunities for optimisation, organisations can drive innovation, enhance product quality, and stay ahead of the competition.
7. Real-time insights and reporting: Skyjed offers real-time insights and reporting capabilities, including a health check feature designed for executive updates. These features enable users to quickly assess the status of their projects and initiatives. Compared to traditional methods like PowerPoint and Excel, Skyjed's platform allows for faster generation of reports, reducing the time needed from hours to just minutes. This efficiency empowers executives to make informed decisions promptly based on up-to-date information provided by Skyjed's intuitive and dynamic reporting tools.

By leveraging the Skyjed approach, organisations can quickly establish a robust product governance framework that promotes strategic alignment, risk management, compliance, performance monitoring, and collaboration. This helps ensure that products meet customer needs, achieve business objectives, and adhere to regulatory requirements throughout their lifecycle.

Skyjed's Approach and Benefits: Skyjed offers a comprehensive product management and governance platform designed specifically to cater to the needs of product managers and product governance frameworks. Their intuitive, all-in-one tool streamlines the process, making it easier for product teams to focus on delivering better outcomes, meeting obligations, and driving growth and success for both customers and organisations.

Actionable Tips to Get Started:

1. Assess your current product governance framework: Identify gaps and areas for improvement in your existing processes, data access, monitoring capabilities, and team collaboration.
2. Define a trust-centred approach: Place the customer at the core of your product governance framework, proactively mitigating non-financial compliance risks and fostering a culture of trust.
3. Leverage reliable data: Establish mechanisms to collect, analyse, and utilise reliable data for decision-making and monitoring.
4. Enable active monitoring: Implement tools and processes that enable real-time monitoring of product performance, compliance, and risk indicators.
5. Foster collaboration: Encourage cross-functional collaboration to ensure all stakeholders align and work towards shared product governance goals.

What is in a product governance framework? 

Product Governance Framework

Product governance is not a one size fits all, and each product portfolio organisation is different.   No process is linear, however generally a modern product governance framework includes four key phases: design, distribute, monitor, and continuous improvement.  

Design 

In this phase, you'll learn how to better understand customer needs and address pain points. You'll move through discovery, experimentation, shaping a product and ultimately defining your products design and distribution. 

The design phase is about ideation and shaping new products, finding new possibilities for existing products, which will evolve into a commercial solution if successful. 

In this phase you will start to build your team, get smart on your regulatory challenges and obligations, and make choices about distribution strategy and conditions.  You will also identify what review triggers will be needed to monitor the financial and non-financial risks or obligations for your product when in market. 

Distribute 

Here you'll prepare and execute to get your idea to market and how to maximise its impact – this is across your selected distribution channels to maximise the commercial success and delivering customer value.  

You will also finalise any mapping and implementation requirements including data collection of your distribution conditions and review triggers and ensure they are in place when in market. 

Monitor 

In the monitoring phase, you'll oversee your product strategy with your team, make sense of the customer and product data and insights collected, and identify opportunities for improvement and early warning of risks.  

You'll monitor review trigger thresholds, review your product design such as your target market determination for example and product performance. Then, you will identify and document ongoing improvement action plans until such time that you're ready to exit the product from the market. 

Continuous Improvement 

Now, this is where you execute the action plans and continually iterate and improve. You'll figure out how to plan and re-plan to meet your performance metrics and refine your product design and strategy and the business model. You will keep the customer at the heart of the process and spend adequate time monitoring review triggers and your product design and distribution obligations. 

A Product Governance working example  

Product governance is imperative and indispensable, but no one enjoys the hours of preparation required for regular monitoring reviews.  Whether its lite regular monthly or quarterly product reviews or detailed annual product reviews or monthly updates to a Product Governance Forum it’s hard to find the time to down tools for a few weeks and late nights to do all the preparation required plus manage the BAU of being a product leader and product owner. 

Using a modern product lifecycle management and governance platform such as Skyjed, you can implement and benefit from an automated AI solution.   This automates as much as possible and reduces time spent on mundane or time-consuming manual processes. 

Skyjed Drivers & Templates with Guidance Notes Example

The Skyjed platform delivers a complete 360-degree view of a product’s health and performance.  With our no-code setup Skyjeds platform is flexible to meet different business goals or governance framework’s. 

With Skyjed you can replace all those spreadsheets, email trails and shared drives with different documents with a tool that records and manages the entire history of the product and its lifecycle management and governance all in one place.   

By choosing from Skyjed’s prebuilt drivers and design or review templates (or you can easily create your own in minutes) you are ready to start.   When you commence a product monitoring review, you are presented with a comprehensive set of information input drivers that guide you through the process.  

One of the benefits is when you commence the following review the information and data is automatically populated from the previous review. This means you are only looking for what has changed since the previous review and therefore the process gets faster and faster over time.  As a result product leaders will recognise insights and changes easily and make faster strategic decisions to address opportunities or risks. 

How to create a modern governance framework using templates and an AI-powered platform 

Lifecycle Management

Skyjed's lifecycle management features help product leaders manage the entire lifecycle of their products, from ideation to retirement. These features include:

• Product design: Skyjed provides a suite of tools to help product leaders design and develop products that meet the needs of their customers. These tools include product and regulatory requirements management, target market statements, user story mapping, and high level business case.
• Launch readiness: Skyjed helps product leaders to ensure that their products are ready for launch by providing a ready to use 'checklist' for product or partner launch.
• Monitoring workspace: Skyjed provides a central workspace for product leaders to monitor the performance of their products. This workspace includes features for tracking metrics, workflows, threshold triggers, scheduling, identifying trends, and generating reports.
• Risk management: Skyjed helps product leaders identify and mitigate product risks. These features include risk assessment, impact analysis, and contingency planning in product level risk dashboard.
• Reporting: Skyjed provides a suite of tools to help product leaders generate ai- based reports on the performance of their products. These reports can track progress, identify trends, and make informed decisions.

You can implement a governance framework and get going by leveraging the unique features of Skyjed’s platform including:  

Governance and Administration

Skyjed's governance and administration features help product leaders ensure that their product lifecycle processes are efficient and effective. These features include:

• Workflows: Skyjed provides workflow tools to help product leaders automate product monitoring by setting thresholds. These tools include notifications and setting risk or strategy actions when hitting the threshold, e.g. 100 customer complaints.
• Scheduler: Skyjed provides a scheduler to help product leaders set one-off or recurring product reviews or events and track and manage their product timelines across the lifecycle.
• Notifications: Skyjed provides a notification system to help product leaders stay informed about the status of their product lifecycle and risks. These notifications can be sent to individuals or groups and customised to include specific information.
• Collaboration: Skyjed provides a platform to help product leaders work together effectively. This platform includes features for product design, monitoring, reporting, file sharing, messaging, roles and permissions.
• Reporting: Skyjed provides a suite of tools to help product leaders generate reports on the performance of their product lifecycles. These reports can track progress, performance metrics, risk and strategy actions, governance reports, distribution and supply chain product information.
• Approval controls: Skyjed provides a suite of tools to help product leaders control the approval process for their products. These tools include role-based access control, audit trails, and version control.
• Record keeping: Skyjed provides tools to help product leaders keep track of their product lifecycle records. These records can be used to comply with regulations, resolve disputes, knowledge management and improve future products.

Download our Automation of Product Monitoring and Reviews Playbook to learn how to effectively conduct product monitoring and governance reviews utilising automation and artificial intelligence to win back time so you can focus on growth. 

Watch our 2-minute explainer video to learn more. 

What our customers say? 

Barbara O'Connor Nash, Head of Product, Great Southern Bank 

As product management in financial services has become more complex and regulated, investing in technology to support the product lifecycle has increased. As product managers are responsible not only for the decisions, they make today but are required to understand and, in some instances, remediate decisions made in the past. Skyjed provides us with a platform where we can now record, track, and monitor these decisions and leaves us with strong record-keeping for future product management teams.    

Additionally, Skyjed has a built-in tool to create your templates without coding - if you have already made your TMD - don't panic - you can simply upload them. As a practical example, we uploaded over 60 TMDs that had been created in a word document into Skyjed workspace in less than 2 hours with complete version control and record keeping. 

Chris Moxley, Head of Product Australian Unity Retail Banking

The automated worlfow trigger tool and notification action shave made monitoring easier and provide peace of mind and tracking seamless.  Its less. complicated than managing product obligations or monitoring in shaed drives with desktop applications that are not fit for purpose.

Hugh Stodart, Head of Product & Engineering, Cipherpoint 

I have not previously come across a tool which brings the elements of product management together like Skyjed does - particularly for ongoing management as distinct from development. 

Michael McCormick, former Head of Product & Strategy, LUCRF Super 

Skyjed has reduced the amount of time spent on manual processes and implementation by 50%. They make ongoing management and monitoring of the Product Governance Lifecycle Framework and DDO very easy. The Skyjed solution will do most of the work for us. 

About Skyjed 

Skyjed is an AI-powered digital product lifecycle management and governance SaaS platform that acts as the single source of truth for product design, health, performance, and governance.  

Skyjed is an ISO-27001 accredited solution. 

It is designed to drive growth and enable product teams to strategically design and monitor products with automation smarts and faster insights to make data-driven decisions with confidence. 

Skyjed’s commitment to innovation and our customers has been rewarded with several industry recognitions including Technology of Year – Finalist in the UK Tech & Innovation Awards 2022, Finalist in the AFR Most Innovative Company 2022 and AFR Sustainability Awards 2022 and Regtech Female Founder of the Year 2021. 

If you would like to experience how Skyjed can help your team build for product success, contact us for a demo or a start a free trial today. 

Experience the unique features of Skyjed: 

• AI-powered modern product lifecycle management and governance solution 
• Flexible to achieve different business goals 
• Pre-built design, monitoring and review templates or easily build your own 
• Automated workflow triggers so you can identify opportunities as they emerge or monitor risks before they take hold 
• Access boardroom-ready product governance and product insight reports and dashboards 
• Team collaboration with review and approval workflows, actions & comments management, version control and record keeping 
• Integrated workspace with product planning and scheduler capability