The 5Cs of Product Management at TELUS Digital
Development · Mar 4, 2021
Product management is a critical part of digital transformation in technology organizations. Product managers and product owners play an important role in figuring out what the market and our customers really want, driving innovation methodically, and balancing between customer value, business value, technical debts amongst other important factors, whenever we are delivering products & features.
The Product practice at TELUS Digital has evolved over the years. Here’s what I consider the important “5Cs of Product Management” at TELUS Digital:
Culture: Our product team closely follows our TELUS Digital principles, to drive product decisions and deliver on our product strategy. Focusing on customers first allows us to build best in class digital experiences. Valuing data over opinions enables us to make true data-driven decisions, rather than listening to the loudest voice in the (virtual) room. Living the principle of “deliver outcomes over outputs” ensures our teams are able to pivot our approach as new, valuable opportunities evolve over time.
Collaboration: Product managers & product owners across our TD teams collaborate closely to produce the best possible outcomes for our customers and our business, whether they are product folks working on customer facing products or internal technical products. For example, product managers in our Data Products team worked closely with our Home Solutions Outcome team to create a “frequently bought together” capability in ecommerce, utilizing data of past purchase patterns to recommend the most suitable add-on products as customers go through the online purchase journey. The launch was met with great success, which will provide a foundation for other Outcome teams such as Mobility and B2B to adopt such an exciting capability.
Cultivation: TELUS Digital provides a lot of training, education and learning opportunities:
One of our Agility Leads provides robust Product Ownership certificate training, from Foundations to Advanced level, for both experienced product folks as well as team members looking to move into Product.
Our organization is constantly looking for world-class training opportunities for our Product teams. In mid-2020, we had over 30 team members join a remote product strategy workshop hosted by Gibson Biddle (former VP Product at Netflix & former Chief Product Officer at Chegg).
Our partners, such as Adobe, Decibel, Siteimprove, provide hands-on tools training sessions for our team members. This allows our product managers to develop additional core competencies such as data analytics and digital accessibility, helping them become well-rounded product professionals.
We also have a mentorship program that gives our product folks further opportunities to enhance skill sets that are important to their career. Mentors in the program get to work on their mentorship & coaching skills.
Community of Practice: We have a monthly meeting called the "Product Guild", which has been ongoing for a few years. Product folks from across TELUS Digital meet and share best practices. We have lots of internal speakers engaging our community with discussions on relevant topics, from digital accessibility to backlog prioritization to product analytics implementation. Every quarter, we also invite an external Product leader to share with us their industry knowledge and story.
Centre of Excellence: In February 2021, I had the pleasure of working with a group of fellow Product enthusiasts to launch the MVP of the TELUS Digital Centre of Excellence for Product. A Centre of Excellence (CoE) is an internal consulting group to support a practice / discipline (in this case, Product) in our organization, and serves as a knowledge base of dedicated resources. Our vision for this CoE is to empower TELUS to become a self-sustaining Product focused organization and inspire members to always learn and improve in order to become the best version of themselves. To that end, we are working on rolling out an internal repository that contains product tools, frameworks, articles, books, videos, training materials, and other resources, with CoE membership perks, to encourage participation from anyone who loves product management.
Being a product professional at TELUS Digital is an exciting career, with a lot of opportunities for measurable growth. You will get to experience what true agile product management is like, in a forward-thinking organization that truly values diversity, equity, and inclusion. If you are interested in joining our teams as a product manager or a product owner, check out our careers page here.
