Riot Games on Moving beyond Product Ownership

• 0:20 Introductions
• 0:53 Introducing Riot Games
• 1:23 The importance of the complete and comprehensive gaming experience
• 1:50 A wide and diverse set of opportunities and needs in the game ecosystem
• 2:10 The need for a framework to make really tough product decisions
• 2:32 The importance of a clear strategy when faced with many good ideas - selecting which ones not to pursue
• 2:48 The were already good at doing product ownership, the challenge was ensuring that they were building the right thing and choosing what not to work on
• 3:15 In the Agile community most of the conversation is about being better product owners, not having better product strategy and this is a gap
• 3:45 The challenge was to come up with a framework for product strategy that still supported the autonomy of the teams
• 4:22 A framework to make tough decisions with the flexibility for the teams to choose how to do it
• 4:33 Listing some of the sources where they drew ideas from
• 4:50 The experiment is finding ways to connect the ideas from various sources into something that is useful across the whole product lifecycle and is useful for the teams
• 5:25 Seeing the change in mindset from tactical product ownership to strategically aligned product management
• 5:38 This starts with having people think differently about product management
• 5:52 The need to develop systems that support the new ways of thinking
• 6:08 Remaining true to the Riot culture while making these changes
• 6:18 A practical first step was aligning on common terminology – ensuring that the same terminology and language is used consistently across all the teams
• 6:35 In the product space there are lots of loosely defined terms (outcome, impact, mission, vision, strategy…) so aligning on common terminology and meaning was an important early step
• 7:12 Describing how the work of Jeff Patton resonated with the Riot teams and culture
• 7:28 It’s difficult to make the mental shift, but it’s really important
• 7:40 The intent and goal of this shift is to maximize the value and impact to players while minimizing the output of the teams (build more of the right stuff)
• 8:17 An example of this culture shift is in the change in focus from outputs (features) to outcomes – the changed player experience
• 8:48 Aspire for new behaviours rather than building more stuff
• 9:05 Shifting from measuring outputs to outcomes
• 9:26 The challenge with defining the outcomes and how they will be measured
• 9:58 Love the product isn’t a behavioural change – identify the changed behaviours the new capability will result in
• 10:14 Start by identifying the behavioural changes we want to see and why we want them and then empower teams to decide how to achieve this outcome
• 10:45 Ensuring that the framework and tools are aligned with the organisation culture rather than trying to change the culture
• 11:18 Create systems which allow the new behaviours to emerge in a culturally aligned way
• 11:35 Describing elements of the model
• 11:45 A vision is an aspiring articulation of a future state
• 12:10 A vision is a statement and a set of descriptions to really get people to see the picture of the future state
• 12:24 The vision is important because the teams are truly empowered
• 12:38 Vision is the ultimate alignment and empowering tool
• 12:58 The second component is product strategy - to be able to define a set of options and choices
• 13:24 Clarifying the difference between option and choice – option is the set of possible paths to take to get to a goal; choices are the decisions that have to be made about what to do and what not to do when looking at the options
• 14:36 Options are divergent thinking, choices are convergent thinking
• 15:02 Generating options and choices
• 15:26 The next component of the framework is validation – when we generate options we have inherent bias about them, so it is necessary identify the assumptions we are making
• 16:04 Find the most critical assumption in the options and run some validation tests, which may result in eliminating some, expose a clear winner or invalidate them all
• 16:35 Don’t spend so much time reducing risk that you lose the opportunities
• 17:12 The fourth component of the framework is creating opportunity or outcome canvases
• 17:29 Answering the question “how are you going to win?”
• 17:57 Once we have the defined outcome now the skills of product ownership/product management come in to play to define the outputs (the things we can build) which could achieve the outcomes
• 18:08 Creating the backlogs, epics etc
• 18:17 The pattern of divergent and convergent thinking also happens at the output/backlog level
• 18:48 Summarizing the overall aspects of the model
  • Create a vivid vision
  • Generate strategic options
  • Run experiments to create strategy validation
  • Learn & identify assumptions
  • Generate opportunities/outcomes
  • Identify the outputs which can deliver the outcome
  • Filter the outputs using a prioritization technique
  • Build the backlog and apply product ownership practices
• 19:35 Discussing the conference audience feedback from the presentation – validated and pleasantly surprised how much the ideas resonated with the conference audience
• 20:12 The agile community has focused largely on tactical product ownership without providing much guidance around the strategic aspects
• 20:44 Listing some of the thought leaders in the space and acknowledging that their work is the foundation of this framework
• 20:55 The ideas have not been integrated into a cohesive vision to value workflow which organisations and teams can apply practically
• 21:25 Showing how the ideas from various sources can be linked together to form the framework described here
• 21:53 The importance of doing tis in a way that fits with the organisation – this way works for Riot and fits with the Riot culture, it may not work in the same way elsewhere
• 22:10 The importance of founding this work on agile principles and fitting it to the organisation context  *** Good soundbite ***
• 22:25 This is not a static model – it is constantly being tweaked and improved and that is necessary
• 22:52 Don’t copy any model directly – be inspired and figure out through experimentation and learning what could work in your organisation
• 23:16 Advice for others looking to adopt some of these ideas – ensure it’s aligned with your organisation culture
• 23:56 Look beyond the limitations of product ownership into upstream activities where outcomes need to be defined
• 24:23 To have agility in the tactical space you need to have it in the strategic space
• 24:48 The value of creating common terminology and common definitions for terms is huge
• 26:32 Anybody in the product development lifecycle should be able to think strategically

Mentioned:

• Agile 2017
• Riot Games
• Jeff Patton
• Roman Pilcher
• Eric Reis
• Roger Martin
• Marty Cagan