Remit
Product Organiser: Leaving off from the legacy role of Opportunity Development and emphasising the building relationships, extracting requirements and putting together proposal notes.
- The role is intended to be having meetings with external organisations to collaborate on Mapped features or just become Mapped users, processing these out into one sheets or other written documentation.
- The role does not decide on resourcing towards this work or these notes if any became funded, including themselves on this work, any more than other roles in this arena do.
- The role is separate from the gaining of funding because ideas are infinite and always valuable but flogging them to funders is quite grounded. We don’t ever want to have a meeting with a funder where we couldn’t express a million exciting directions and the ideation of these ideas and their selling in need a bit of a different way of working.
Responsibilities and activities
1. Building political relationships
Product organising involves getting out of the building and finding people who really want to work on stuff, supported by digital infrastructure that Common Knowledge is already building. The Product Organiser role, like the New Work role, both come from the retired Opportunity Development role. Whilst New Work focuses on consultancy projects writ large, Product Organising focuses on product-based partnerships.
What can guide the product organiser is a mixture of things:
- Funding is still a discussion, because we're looking for people who are serious about trying stuff out at some scale. The phrase "put your money where your mouth is" is apt; it signals commitment. This might be organisations with budget, or it might be funders who'll engage with the project meaningfully.
- Strong methodology is another signature of a good partnership. We're looking for users who represent a constituency of organisers and campaigns. If we can hone in on a methodology that applies across the movement, we know we're looking at the right abstraction for digital infrastructure.
- And cause is something to select for too. We ultimately care about strategic wins!
In this way, the Product Organiser role is a political role. Movement infrastructure is a source of power, and so facilitating its construction is a practice of building power by collecting up resources — organising. Power's radical root is solidarity.
2. Extracting requirements
Otherwise known as user research! This work requires some collation. We hear feedback from a variety of sources:
- Online forums and chats
- Early meetings and discussions
- In the course of usage, working with partners
3. Processing feedback into product roadmap proposals
There's a distinction between user feedback, which is particular and specific to a user/organisation/campaign, and product features specifications, which are generally reusable by different users/organisations/campaigns.
Accountability
As with all roles, PO is owned and accountable to the co-op through processes and tools.
Feedback meetings
The role should regularly feed back on its remit, with reference to the co-op mission and current strategy.
- (Impact)
- 24/25 Strategy: grant spend-out
- 24/25 Strategy: quantitative/qualitative stats
- Relationships we're building
- 24/25 Strategy: Grow the Mapped community of practice — 5 -> 20 organisations
- Potential users and development partners.
- Timelines and upcoming opportunities.
- Learnings
- Methodology. How movement actors are organising and where they're reaching the limits of their operational effectiveness, but also where they're coming up against infrastructural-political challenges.
- Technology. What technology they're using and the 'market' landscape we're operating in
- Product proposals — pattern-matching feedback and suggesting directions to the product team for discovery / delivery on the roadmap.
- (So what for the roadmap?)
Cycle show and tell
The regular cycle show and tells are a natural moment for the product organiser to share what they are hearing, learning and developing with movement actors.
Tools & artefacts
Time tracking
New budget for "Product Organising" in Productive under Mapped: https://app.productive.io/16626-common-knowledge/financials/budgets/d/deal/2306915/services?filter=NjA2ODgy
Productive pipeline
Core concern is the Productive pipeline called ‘Mapped’, used to track potential user organisations and partnerships: https://app.productive.io/16626-common-knowledge/sales/deals?filter=NzY5MDgw&pipelineId=73209