I am a PO for a risk management app. We have built the app from ground up and our users are using it pretty happily. The sponsoring business have also said that their needs are fulfilled and has no time and money appetite for further big change to the app. And further change is not necessary
My question is, in your organization, what happens to the product once further product roadmap is not required? Do you continue to ‘look after’ it or hand over to some other team?
Uber on day 1: “Holy mackerel I can get someone to pick me up from anywhere through my phone!”
Uber on day 1000: “The drive was slightly bumpy and the driver had a weird moustache. 1 star”
User satisfaction always deteriorates. You can’t just hang up the roadmap and leave it. Either improve it or delete it.
In this scenario, the app goes into maintenance mode. You won’t need to maintain an exclusive roadmap for the app but the app maintenance will fall into another roadmap of some description and managed via that but it might just be “bug fixes” that appear on said roadmap. Or perhaps they’ll fall into a tech debt bucket.
Either way, i suspect you’ll still “own” the app/product so not sure who you’d hand it over to. Is there another team that could pick up the maintenance?
Also work should continue to keep it consistent with other apps and tech you have in the org, but fixes, platform updates, etc.
But talk to your manager about what else you should be doing because this app is probably no longer a full time job.
At a minimum you’ll need some kind of resources to maintain it in the future:
Products are like babies, once you give birth to them, they forever require constant attention and love until they die. And just like parents, the best group to provide the support for a product is the group that gave it life.
That might be L2/L3 support, with L1 support coming from a shared customer support team.
Hope that makes sense.
Refactor and maintenance. Software can always be better.
We continue to look after it, and it goes into a maintenance state. Occasionally engineering will go back in to update its underpinning tech, or do a bug fix. Sometimes it’s a popular app and stuff starts to slow down so it needs some optimization, or additional apps around it are developed and it needs some attention to integrate.
We will mainly get involved to prioritize fixes or give business context, or update documentation.
Your competition won’t stop developing their app so you can’t stop your roadmap either. Since this is probably internal, it might be worth it to start asking questions about things like “what is the state of the art in risk management? Where do you [addressed at senior risk folks] see our risk management work going in five years?”