What we do all day – Focus on what we build. Not how we build it.
The Operations Information Product Group is a partner with R&D, Architecture, Sales, and Marketing. We help represent the voice of the user, customer, and the market and prioritize them into the software capabilities we deliver as products or services. This involves working across many organizational groups and prioritizing feedback. That feedback starts with empathy – identifying the specific use cases and scenarios we hear, and then translating that into sympathy – addressing a wide range of use cases and prioritizing them into actionable work that helps AVEVA build and sell reliable, supportable software.
At AVEVA, we have many areas of responsibility (this won’t be exhaustive) when delivering products to market. We can divide the work up like this:
| Development | Architecture | Product | Marketing | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Applies resources to create and deliver on-prem products and software as a service | Structures and designs technical implementations to help development create sustainable offerings | Create Product strategy and road-map by identifying market problems from many sources (users, customers, and market forces) – create scenarios, features, and requirements to help prioritize Development effort | Internal & outbound messaging and communications, demand generation, product and service communications, market definition, research, and studies. | Use supporting information from Product and Marketing (and Product Marketing) to match our buyers’ needs up with AVEVA's software (as built by Development!) |
Users typically speak to software companies about the outcomes they desire rather than the attributes of the software they use to enable those outcomes. Members of the Product Group take accumulated input and break down the outcome statements into key technical and usability categories to make sure we are addressing problems at an infrastructure level vs. an “application” focus. This ensures we deliver capabilities that span markets (e.g. Power Generation, Oil and Gas, etc.), enable a variety of outcomes that suit customer needs (e.g. Energy Management, Condition Based Maintenance, etc.), and provide customers and users a premier support experience.
We call this The Infrastructure Approach, and it can be summarized like this:
When these ideas are applied to user scenarios and stories, we stay true to our mission of delivering infrastructure and platform-level features that serve a wider variety of our customers. This is a core skill that the Product Group must possess and apply consistently to help AVEVA deliver compelling products to market.
The Product Group is the steward of AVEVA’s Operations Information Product Strategy, Roadmap, and Vision. Using our skills, The Infrastructure Approach, and the data we gather about markets, users, and software trends, we help AVEVA deliver on its mission and goals. We make decisions around prioritization in the real world, where AVEVA has realistic capabilities as well as resource constraints.
Approving work, new features, and prioritization is a balancing act which accounts for many factors. Those factors do change over time. Therefore, saying yes – even to a seemingly small thing – often has broader impact than just a single product, team, or customer.
AVEVA Operations Information currently derives revenue from a set of core industry verticals, and in reality, only 2 or 3 of those provide the bulk of that revenue. The combination of Software Reliability (support) and software licenses will change over time as we add more Software as a Service subscription offerings. However, AVEVA’s Operations Information brand name and reputation are derived from two key traits:
The Product Group’s mission is to focus on prioritizing work that leads to more reliable software and the capability to sensibly scale our support services. Customers renew their SRP contracts because of our excellent support (not necessarily new product features – “time to adoption” of new features varies widely). It is critical to understand these aspects of our mission so that we maintain a profitable market stance while gathering and retaining more happy customers.
There are a few main Product Management job functions required to enable AVEVA to build software and bring it to market.
Strategic Product Managers work closely with the VP of Product to build, convey, and deliver the company’s long-term product vision. This work combines input from customers, markets and stakeholders across the organization and supports the short and long term business objectives set by the executive team. The SPMs identify larger efforts, market scenarios, and the sequence of implementation, via Programs, to identify the best path forward.
To coordinate these program based efforts across several teams, Strategic Product Managers work with Engineering Program Managers and Architects to develop scenarios and delivery milestones that create new market-facing offerings.
These collaborative patterns help translate the Product group’s long and short-term product vision and roadmap into AVEVA’s Operations Information software delivery plan. Strategic Product Managers document the market scenarios, value to AVEVA, and high level user stories and corresponding customer feedback in a Program Brief. Strategic Product Managers can use Program Briefs to assist other groups in developing messaging around the market facing components of AVEVA’s Operations Information software stack.
It should be noted that Technical Product Managers and Strategic Product Managers perform different, related functions and therefore must collaborate across various software deliverables. Additionally, Strategic Product Managers do not do people management functions (i.e. TPM’s do not report to SPM’s). These roles are expected to coordinate and communicate to bring large scenarios to market.
Technical Product Managers, like the title suggests, focus on the technical, operational responsibilities of product management. Each TPM has an affinity to a product or service, researching and helping define the customer value and coordinates with the strategic team to generate customer focused features, product deliveries, and a product roadmap.
As program-based efforts enhance our offering to a product or service the associated TPM will align with the assigned development teams. Technical Product Managers must work closely with development Engineering Managers to help translate high level product priorities into work items for development team members. They function as embedded resources for development team(s) that will procure and consolidate inbound customer feedback, and help communicate how the team’s work aligns with AVEVA's product direction.
The Product group is made up of great people with creative ideas and the skills to make them reality. To continuously cultivate the group’s capabilities, the Product group relies on Department Leads. These people leaders will work with individuals on their career path, training, and other opportunities to keep the teams running smoothly. They help with recruiting and serve as a general resource for the teams. Department Leads do not actually do Product Management work or influence the priority discussions that Product Managers perform in their job functions.
The lead of the entire group is the Vice President of Product. This role primarily coordinates with the Vice President of Software Development and works with other leadership roles to bring together resources that will help AVEVA strategically address market problems. This includes staffing, business alignment activities, and externally-facing / customer facing representation of AVEVA's product plans.
Product Management requires expertise and skill levels that can be quite varied. The growth path for the people in the Product Group relies on depth of skills and the capability to address cross-functional requirements. That means each role in the Product Group has multiple levels, and career progress does not necessarily require assuming “people leadership” skills. Product Managers can focus on use cases that cross products as they mature or stay focused on a particular product’s direction.
The levels within the Product Group follow some of the established career paths elsewhere in AVEVA Operations Information R&D. There are, so far, five levels in each Product Management role with an introductory “Product Manager” for internal transfers.
Technical Product Management:
The differentiator between the levels of mastery of each of the role’s skill sets. The actual responsibilities and functions of the role itself will not vary widely between levels.
Learning / Quality / Experience Have you been seeking to improve your craft? Have you developed expertise in multiple PM disciplines?
Efficiency / Reliability / Scope How does your work align with AVEVA’s goals and priorities? Are you delivering clear and complete work items (e.g. scenarios, user stories, personas)? How long does it take to communicate priorities and create plans that Development Teams can execute? Are developers and program managers able to directly translate your work into their backlog? Are you collaborating well between Product, Marketing, R&D, and Sales? Do you understand the nuances of the company / product goals and how that impacts the user and market priority?
Awareness / Perspective / Teamwork How receptive are you to outside feedback on your work? How well do you consider alternate perspectives? How well can you differentiate between your own opinions and motivations vs. the data gathered from users? How well do you translate individual user stories into general patterns that represent value across AVEVA's target market verticals? How well do you apply “The Infrastructure Approach” when translating feature requests into user stories and development priorities? Are you in contact with customers and users? How well are you reflecting the voice of the user?
Communication / Mentoring / Leadership Are you clearly communicating the requirements from a user story to your teammates? Are you able to tie your user stories and requirements back to the overall objectives of a scenario and company goals? How well are you representing information from your stakeholders (e.g. user needs, technical requirements and blockers)? How are you at conflict resolution between various stakeholders? Can you resolve issues without calling more meetings? When you call meetings, are the requirements clear and outcomes achievable? Are you building the trust you need with your peers and stakeholders?
The descriptions below are the main Product Group roles and responsibilities. The differentiators between levels within a role come down to the application of the Technical Skills [T], Productivity [P], Empathy [E], and Influence [I] to that role as well as experience. The actual job descriptions posted in Workday will reflect positions that are available – which may have more specific tailored criteria for the available job’s requirements.
Goal is to gain experience and knowledge in four areas, AVEVA Operations Information products and services, our core customer markets, product management, and how we build and release software. Individual-focused and working on developing proficiencies. Typically works with a mentor that provides support and guidance. Receptive to and learns from feedback from their team. Generally, this career stage does not last long (less than a year) and likely transitions to TPM, although for someone with a more strategic mindset, transitions to SPM.
Responsibilities:
As Technical Product Manager, you will serve as the main evangelist and external resource for your specific products and development teams. You will serve as the glue between the customer, user, Development, and Strategic Product Management branches of Operations Information R&D. Your role will create value for customers and users by understanding the problems they face and how to solve them, breaking down larger user scenarios and themes from a development program into features that maintain a balance between requirements and technical work items. Technical Product Managers focus on what we build and prioritize.
You will concentrate on helping your development team understand requirements by documenting user stories and behavior which in turn will help you craft the feature structure and success criteria required to address real world use cases. Clearly documenting and sharing these stories, features, and requirements, you will help AVEVA remain informed as your features progress toward release. In short, you will discover, distil, analyze, and prioritize multiple sources of information for a development team and create organizational transparency into their delivery efforts.
Technical backlog prioritization, shadowing an experienced TPM. Coordinating with support mostly by bringing support feedback into PM. Advocating the use of UserVoice in the company.
More customer interaction focused. Can move between single teams. Flexibility to pick up a new team quickly. Has a clear vision of the What and is able to articulate that vision.
Contributing to several development teams and led several products/services. Insight to provide efficient and effective direction for multiple teams. Mentoring TPMs. Clear vision and persuasive communication of the What of product.
Responsibilities:
Strategic Product Managers research current and new markets, help develop long-term vision and coordinate larger efforts across products, services, and software development to help solve market problems in collaboration with Technical Product Managers (TPMs). Strategic Product Managers (SPMs) work with Engineering Program Managers (EPMs) to refine and execute value driven scenarios that help create new market-facing offerings. SPMs and TPMs collaborate to prioritize the development work that shepherds AVEVA’s products and services through their complete lifecycle.
SPMs craft market scenarios, high-level user scenarios, interview users to develop personas, identify technical and market trends, and work across internal AVEVA organizations helping refine and articulate AVEVA’s long-term product vision. An SPM’s core skill set will be synthesizing these inputs into actionable development work that enables R&D Program execution and guides Technical Product Management interactions with their development teams to deliver successful products.
Additionally, Strategic Product Managers help Product Marketing Managers develop market-facing and internal messaging that communicates the value and market positioning defined within AVEVA’s long and short-term product vision and roadmap. SPM’s also collaborate with the Cloud, Communities, and Channels group on early-engagement Lighthouse Program activities to help validate product, market, and customer value that supports internal and external product messaging. Program and product-based messaging assists other groups craft critical communication components required to connect customers to the value of AVEVA’s Operations Information software stack. SPMs develop internal documents called “Program Briefs” to help define the development work that brings AVEVA's product vision to fruition. Program Briefs enumerate the product and software service capabilities that need to be built, incrementally improved, and sunset to meet market scenario objectives. SPM’s rely on agile methodologies to break large deliverables into Themes, Milestones, Features, and high-level user stories in a modern, shared Program backlog. This shared backlog is used by R&D and Technical Product Managers to help coordinate and schedule actual development features, work items, and success criteria.
Aligning TPM work with strategic a program. Program is established and work must be coordinated between TPMs to accomplish the program’s objectives.
Flexibility to move between programs as they start and end. Able to run an entire program from inception to completion coordinating with others as needed. Some level of business value assessment for a program. Must be able to assess potential business value of a market scenario and underlying program work. Collaborates closely with Marketing and customer-facing organizations to help provide relevant details required to keep the company and customers informed about product capabilities.
Contributing to longer term vision and strategy. Crafting market scenarios and the programs required to complete a scenario. Mentoring SPMs. Participating resource allocation discussions with leadership. Well-developed intuition around what resources it takes to actually get the work done. Whole market level perspective and business value for a constellation of programs near and long term.
Responsibilities:
As a Department Lead for AVEVA’s Operations Information Product organization, you will serve as the main contact point for all Product Managers (both Technical and Strategic) when it comes to career growth and people leadership. You will serve as a coordination resource that helps balance the team’s skill development and Product people management needs. A major objective will be to cultivate positive, collaborative team dynamics and transparency between Product Managers themselves. You’ll help maintain the visibility, discipline, and skills required to help Product Managers deliver on our Product road map vision. The resulting coordination between the Product Managers will keep the team efficient and effective.
You will help recruit, onboard, and develop our Product Management resources. We will rely on you to identify what your team needs, and leverage AVEVA and external resources to build up the team so that we keep the customer, user, and sales force front and center in our product development.
While you won’t specifically perform Product Management functions, you must understand the process and requirements – this knowledge will help you streamline or facilitate activities and skill development. We expect you to become the coach that creates the ultimate Product Management team.
Responsibilities:
The Vice President of Product will act as strategic thought leader and innovative collaborator with development, marketing, sales, and customer success to deliver world class product strategies, user scenarios, requirements documentation, and product business plans. This executive will lead a team that is responsible for the product planning and commercialization, including but not limited to: identifying, gathering and prioritizing user scenarios, market, product, partner and customer requirements, defining the product vision and strategy, managing the product road map, and working closely with key departments and individuals to ensure product deliverables, revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met.
Responsibilities: