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:
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.
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:
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:
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: