This week I had the opportunity to speak at the Building Business Capability 2023 (BBC 2023) conference in Las Vegas.

In this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share the presentation along with an couple observations from the conference.

Moving from Business Analyst to Product Owner to Product Manager

I first noted back in 2017 that product owner and product manager roles offer a viable career path for business analysts, especially those who currently work on custom software development projects.

When I wrote that article, BA’s often had the opportunity to move into product ownership at their current company especially if the org was going through an agile transformation.

The path to product manager at that time usually required changing companies.

These days, as the number of product transformations increases, business analysts often have the opportunity to move into product management and stay at their current company.

​In the session I used Neal Cabbage’s Product Team Competencies framework to compare business analyst, product owner, and product manager roles.

I then explained some steps you can take to move from a BA role to move into product owner or product manager with the help of 2x2 matrix, because why not?

Multiple BA Career Paths

BBC is the official conference of the International Association of Business Analysis (IIBA) so it inherently focuses on content of interest to business analysts.

When I put this session together I assumed that the content would appeal to a subset of the attendees – those who want to move their careers in more of a product direction or work at a company in the midst of a product transformation.

That also inherently means that the content would not be of interest to other attendees, most likely a majority.

I confirmed that my assumptions are correct.

Some of the the attendees are just starting their business analysis careers. There are others whose organizations are just launching into agile transformations (while most companies undergoing a product transformation have already adopted agile).

User Research

Given that wide variety of interests, I realized if I wanted to get a handle on what people are interested in learning more about, the best way to find out is to ask them.

To make that research as effective as possible, I used the Product Competencies framework to structure my research.

I provided handouts with the framework and asked the attendees to indicate the topics they were most interested in learning about.

Here are the top five topic areas:

1. Product Roadmap
2. Product Vision
3. Feature Prioritization
4. Opportunity Discovery
5. Innovation

Hit reply if you’d like to know the full set of results.

Observations from BBC 2023

It was great to get back to an in person conference and catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in a while and make some new connections.

I published a BBC 2023 page to share my thoughts and content from some of the folks I caught up with and met at the conference.

Thanks for Reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, just reply to this email.

Talk to you next week,

Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media