The Forward Deployed Product Owner: the role that decides what good looks like for business AI
Agentic AI has finally given businesses the leverage to design what ideal business processes should look like. That shift has reshaped our Business Analyst and Product Owner roles at Nimble into something new: the role AI native enablement actually needs.
Agentic AI has given businesses unique leverage: to finally design and roll out what ideal business processes should look like.
For years the process followed whatever the software allowed. That constraint has gone. You can now start from what the business wants the work to look like, and build to that.
Our recent experience deploying AI native solutions across businesses has led us to refine our Business Analyst and Product Owner roles into the Forward Deployed Product Owner.
Why? From waterfall to agile, the roles involved in defining what gets built worked to a different model. The focus was scope, interfaces and software engineering. With agentic workflows, it now takes a different combination of skills to make the magic happen:
- designing how agents and people hand work to each other,
- mapping the systems and data touchpoints,
- astute senior leadership comms, and
- collaborating with engineering teams to ensure reliable and trusted outcomes.
As our very own FDPO Megan Harris puts it:
It’s much more hands on. Working closely with the business stakeholders, you go from idea to deployment, and enable staff in the new ways of working while demonstrating business gains, in days rather than weeks and months of build.
If you are planning an AI rollout, the question worth settling early is who in your business owns the definition of good. In our experience that decides the outcome more than the technology itself.
#Agent360 #AINative #ForwardDeployed #ProductManagement