How do organisations transit from project management to product management? What are challenges and transformation required? Join Garret Yap from GovTech Singapore as he shares more about a product transformation journey in both the private and public sector.

1. Transition from Project to Product
Garret Yap
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2. About the Speaker
Hi Everyone! I am Garret
 Deputy Director, GovTech
 Development Centre Lead
 Agile Competency Lead
 Delivery Manager Chapter Lead
 SCS Product Management Committee Chairman
 Ex-DBS, Ex-Huawei, Ex-PhilipCapital
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3. CONTENTS
• Background
• Project management & Product management
• How to transit from project to product (Discussion)
• Challenges
• Successful examples
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4. Background
Why organisations are shifting towards product?
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5. Background
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Source: https://www.information-age.com/gartner-product-digital-transformation-123479282/
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-
insights/the-product-management-talent-dilemma

6. Why organisations are shifting towards product?
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• Increased Software Delivery Velocity
• Agile development approach is used for product in order to increase software
delivery velocity, improve service reliability, and build shared ownership
among stakeholders.
• Increased Ownership and Ideas
• Cross functional teams with product ownership enables more ideations with
the participation of the whole team including engineers, data scientists,
and UX designers. Receive early feedbacks to validate ideas.
• Improved Customer Experience
• Focuses on customer journey and conducts customer research. Receive early
feedbacks to continue improving customer experience.

7. Project management & Product
management
What’s project management & product management?
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8. What’s Product Management?
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Product
Manager
Marketing
Legal
Development
Team
Operations
Finance
Sales
Customers
Data
Analytics Introduction
Goal: Find
Product
Market Fit
Adapt to
customer
needs
Growth
Goal:
Acquire
more market
share
Scaling to
support
more
customers
Maturity
Goal:
Customer
retention
Fighting
competition,
focus on
customer
satisfaction
Decline
Goal:
Determine
next action
Exit strategy
or pivoting
to other
areas
Product Lifecycle

9. Project Management & Product Management
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Project Management Product Management
Focus on Cost, Schedule & Quality Focus on users, markets, trends, situations
“Fixed” “Growth / Dynamic”
Focus on execution & implementation Define strategic decision, product vision &
goals
Oversee previously approved plan &
schedule
Manage product roadmap
Handover to Ops for maintenance Continuous enhancements
Focus on deliverable output Focus on business outcome
Software Development Lifecycle Product Lifecycle

10. Differences between Project & Product
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Category Project Management Product Management
Objective Completion according to schedule,
scope & budget
Product success metrics
Budget Fixed Depends on success
Scope Fixed Changing
Schedule Start Date & End Date Long-lived
Development
Approach
Waterfall Agile
Ownership Technology (Project Manager) Business (Product Manager)
Environment NA Rapid Delivery

11. How to transit from project to
product? Discussion
Sharing of ideas to facilitate the transition
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12. Objective
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• Identify product vision, product goals & product success metrics
• Shape and prioritise product backlog according to vision & goals
• Track & monitoring product success metrics such as customer satisfactions

13. Budget
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WATERFALL Product (AGILE)
Funds and manpower are more even out throughout the product lifecycle.
• Agile tooling such as Jira, confluence and CICD tools are missed out during budgeting.
• The more releases planned, the more compliance-related testing budget is needed.

14. Scope
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Conduct discovery workshops, user research and customer journey
mapping for ideation and envision of product goals.

15. Scope
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Create a prioritised Product Backlog with different priority for
reprioritisation instead of fixed scope. Cater for scope & schedule buffer.

16. Schedule
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• Product roadmap planning
• Early Release of MVP (within 6 months)
• For prototyping and piloting
• Version with ONLY the smallest possible set of features that enables its value
proposition for the target audience.
• Enable you to gather feedback from early adopters
• Frequent Subsequent Releases (at least once every 6 months)
• Remember to cater for production support from first release.

17. Development Approach
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Agile Adoption Agile Project Funding
Product Backlog
Management
• Existing outsourced
project is fixed cost
and fixed scope.
Adoption of Agile in
this case serves little
value.
• Perform contract
variation to allow
flexible scope
• Challenge
assumption that
revamp means
building the exact
same functionality
• Published Backlog
Full of Must-Haves in
contract – No room
to swop anything
out
• Discuss with users
to prioritise backlog
with MOSCOW
technique
• Use of whitespace or
Seed funding
approach
• Use of phased
funding approach
• Use of options in
outsourced
contracts

18. Ownership
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• Ownership of the Product lies with the Product Manager.
• Full-time representative from Business.
• Product management course and Agile course are vital for product
manager role to deliver full value.
• Bridge the gap between different stakeholders such as legal,
marketing, sales, delivery teams, etc
• Empowered to make product-related decisions without having to
consult higher management.

19. Environment
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• Enabling Tools for Rapid Delivery
• Agile Management Tools such as
Jira/Azure, Trello
• Continuous Integration, Continuous
Delivery (CI/CD) Pipeline
• Remote working Tools (COVID-19)
• Collaboration Tools: Confluence, Wiki,
Sharepoint, Trello, Miro
• Communication Tools: MS Teams, Slack,
Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram
• Open communication

20. Challenges
What are the common challenges?
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21. Challenges
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• Processes
• Funding processes are too slow and rigid, rapid ramp down after X years
• Waterfall software development cycle, tools that support rapid delivery
• Culture
• Ownership from business to own the products
• Open communication, servant leadership, risk for failure, team concept
• Structure
• Dedicated product people
• Capabilities in DevOps, UX, data, etc
• Top management support & knowledge

22. Examples
What are some successful examples?
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23. Examples
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• Processes: Digital transformation started in 2014
o Shift from outsourced to in-house
o Develop high-performing agile teams - Agile as default
o Automate everything - Set up DevOps teams
o Design for modern systems – Set up cloud teams
o Organise for success – Focus on employee tools
• Culture: GANDALF, 30,000 start up, MOJO, CEO support
• Structure: Shift from products to platform
o Division of both business & tech as equal partners with joint KPIs
o CEO support

24. Examples
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• Processes: GovTech was established in 2016
• Shift from outsourced to in-house
• Develop high-performing agile teams - Agile as default
• SHIP/HATS central CICD platform for WOG
• Government Commercial Cloud first strategy
• Culture: The GovTech Way, Agile Bold Collaboration
• Structure:
• Set up product management division with full-time product
managers & product owners
• Product management chapter with detailed competencies
• CE Support

25. Give Us Your Feedback
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Day 1 Programme

26. Thank You!
Garret_yap@tech.gov.sg
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