Enable Modernization with a Product Management Mindset

The Department of Defense (DOD) has mission-critical services that meet a wide variety of specialized needs for analysts, developers, and warfighters alike. However, many digital products developed and maintained to address these needs are outdated or redundant. By employing the fundamentals and mindset of modern project management, DOD can solve these challenges and realize new efficiencies. 

Product management oversees the development, deployment, and sustainment of capabilities, ensuring that products align with mission objectives, meet user needs, and are available for reuse across the enterprise. The product lifecycle is the forcing function behind the concept of continuous innovation and delivery.

The product lifecycle provides standardization, ensures timely deployments, and empowers collaboration between teams across a given project or organization. This practice focuses on end-user value by viewing software delivery as an iterative, cyclical process. It enables DOD organizations to incrementally deliver value in shorter timeframes and at the speed of mission. 

Fundamentally, product management is focused on the end user’s need to drive innovative, iterative solutions. This relentless focus on the end user allows developers to create and deliver reusable products that are strategically designed and of high quality—equipping users with the information they need when they need it.

Product management creates benefits throughout the product lifecycle. For example, it:

• Ties the end-to-end value stream of development and delivery
• Aligns products directly to business and mission requirements
• Prioritizes product focus and resource allocation based on mission objectives
• Establishes continuous user feedback to prioritize capabilities and features

This strategic function also provides long-term advantages:

• Defines and analyzes performance metrics to make improvements based on data
• Reduces product failure through iterative deployments
• Enables iterative delivery to support long-term success and informed strategic vision

Product management ensures deployed solutions evolve in real time with changing mission needs and organizational culture. This is critical for DOD, whose missions must adapt to address real-world circumstances quickly, effectively, and accurately.

The discipline takes the project management baseline further by identifying user groups to establish a granular level of requirements for delivery. Assessing challenges and organizational needs is critical for DOD services and solutions to fulfill the specific needs of organizations, teams, and varied groups. 

One of the biggest challenges many DOD organizations face is producing scalable, mission-driven solutions for use across the enterprise. Product management tackles this challenge by engaging users early and often throughout the entire software development lifecycle. The iterative nature of deliveries empowers end users with quality products and allows organizations across the department to adapt quickly and easily to evolving mission needs.

Organizations that operate with a product management mindset are more readily equipped to respond to changing mission requirements, rapidly grow in parallel to global challenges, and responsibly scale for organizations across DOD to deliver solutions as needed. Combined with agile software development best practices, product management empowers developers to emphasize operations and continuously improve products across the lifecycle, delivering the following outcomes:

• Customer-focused design
• Improved user experience
• Iterative developments
• Continuous learning

This enables development teams to establish and use continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to deliver timely, impactful, mission-driven products to end users. With a clear vision, organizations can scale development aligned with mission objectives and establish a framework where high-value solutions are delivered to end users that can be reused across DOD. Adoption of the product management mindset offers defense leaders a chance to successfully modernize the enterprise through continuous development of innovative, mission-driven solutions at scale.