Cross-product owners
What are cross-product owners?
Cross-product owners are created for priorities that:
- Require the consistent collaboration or attention of multiple engineering teams
- Are ongoing beyond the scope of a single quarter’s work
- Have high enough impact that it justifies the use of this process
Why do we have cross-product owners?
Priorities that meet the above criteria have higher risk of failure without additional process, because:
- It’s more difficult for individual team stakeholders to prioritize across teams if no one’s focused on the project-level priorities
- It’s more difficult to track and collaborate with many stakeholder teams on the same project than to have an owner and process for ensuring inputs and outputs are routed effectively
Cross-product owner components
Ownership responsibilities
The owner of a cross-product initiative takes on this responsibility in addition to their current role.
Owning a cross-product initiative is neither a role change nor a title change.
The owner is directly responsible for:
- Setting the vision, strategy, and goals of the initiative
- Maintaining effective collaboration with all other initiative stakeholders
- Leading planning and managing dependencies for the initiative
- Creating scalable, repeatable processes for tracking and managing initiative inputs
- Ensuring the cross-product owner handbook pages are maintained and up-to-date
- Reporting to executive leadership on a cadence befitting the ownership area
Ownership commitment
Cross-product owners can give initiatives a range of priority, depending on the work involved and the speed desired. To ensure all stakeholders of the owner’s original role, the cross-product area, and product leadership are aligned on the relative priority, we note a relative commitment.
A “50-50” split commitment means the ownership area is equal in priority to the owner’s other responsibilities, so the top-priority half of [this project’s tasks] and [the other responsibilities] will get done.
Slack channel
Every cross-product owner should maintain a public slack channel named #cp-[ownership_area].
Handbook page
Every cross-product owner maintains a handbook page describing relevant ownership area components. These usually include:
- The goal of the initiative
- Concrete examples of what the ownership area is and is not
- The current strategy and processes
- Links to resources (such as GitHub labels, meeting notes, research folders, roadmaps)