With the imminent release of ITIL® Product (Gray et al, 2026), PeopleCert has expanded the scope of traditional Service Management by combining Digital Product and Service Management. While product concepts are present throughout all of the new books, ITIL® Product reframes product development as an end‑to‑end lifecycle that runs from discovering opportunities to operating and continually improving digital products and services, rather than as a narrow “build” phase inside projects. This mirrors the historical shift from early brand management, where a single manager was accountable for a product’s commercial performance over time, to modern product management, which owns outcomes across discovery, design, delivery, and operations. By explicitly structuring the lifecycle into activities such as Discover, Design, Acquire, Build, Transition, and Operate, ITIL® Product codifies the same holistic view that has gradually emerged in the history of product development as organizations moved away from one‑off project thinking toward continuous product stewardship.​

A second big idea is the strong emphasis on aligning product work with vision, strategy, and portfolio, which reflects the evolution from “feature factories” to outcome‑driven product organizations. In the Discover and Design chapters, ITIL® Product repeatedly stresses the need to understand context and inputs, agree direction and objectives, and ensure that product roadmaps stay anchored in organizational strategy and value creation. Historically, this echoes the move from reactive, sales‑driven roadmaps toward strategic product management, where decisions are guided by portfolio trade‑offs, positioning, and long‑term customer value rather than just near‑term delivery capacity.​

ITIL Product® also embeds cross‑functional collaboration and agile ways of working as core success factors, which parallels the industry’s shift from siloed development and operations to integrated product teams. The Build and Operate chapters highlight critical success factors such as strong collaboration between engineering, product management, design, and quality assurance; agile cadences; automated CI/CD pipelines; and incremental delivery with feature toggles and safe rollouts. These practices track closely with the historical rise of Agile, DevOps, and empowered product teams that own the full lifecycle, breaking down the old handoffs between development, operations, and service management.​

Another major theme is the product‑and‑service value chain: ITIL® Product systematically ties product decisions to the realities of cloud sourcing, service providers, and operational environments, including activities like acquiring cloud services, planning transitions, and coordinating responsibilities between vendors and service providers. This reflects how modern product development history has moved from shipping boxed software or discrete projects to operating live digital services in complex ecosystems. As organizations adopted SaaS, cloud platforms, and managed services, product management had to expand its remit to include sourcing, deployment, and long‑term operability—precisely the terrain ITIL® Product formalizes.​

Finally, the book’s focus on metrics and continuous improvement—such as delivery velocity, cycle time, defect leakage, and team health—as part of each lifecycle activity reflects the historical maturation of product development into a data‑driven discipline. ITIL® Product treats these measures and their associated “critical success factors” as integral to managing products effectively, not as optional reporting after the fact. This aligns with the broader trajectory from intuitive, craft‑driven product development to modern product operations and analytics practices, where teams continuously learn from production feedback and telemetry to refine products and processes over time. ITIL® Product is definitely a contribution to the field and connects to the broader concepts of ITIL® nicely.

#ProductManagement #ITSM #PeopleCert

Bibliography

Gray, V., Konageski, W., & McDonald, S. (2026). ITIL Product [Book]. PeopleCert.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been active on my blog site (https://adaptiman.com) for some time. Good news – nothing happened to me, I’m not sick, or burned out. I spent the last year working with PeopleCert on the authoring team writing the newest version of ITIL®. The authoring and editorial team at PeopleCert is unbelievable and worth a longer description. In the coming days, I will share my insights on new ITIL®, the authoring process, and how the new version will affect our profession moving forward.

Three weeks ago, PeopleCert released the latest version of ITIL® Foundation . This is the fifth version of ITIL® released since 1989 and, in my opinion, could be the best yet. I was one of the authors for the new version. The experience was eye-opening on a number of levels, which I will describe below. But first, most colleagues want to know what is different with this version – why would I want to spend money to get certified for version 5?

What’s New?

There are three main changes to Foundation with a number of smaller but meaningful updates. Most importantly, ITIL® has expanded its scope beyond IT Service Management (ITSM) to include Product Management. The language in Foundation has changed from “ITSM” to “DPSM” (Digital Product and Service Management). This shift, while subtle, is seismic. The product management community has had a long run operating outside the scope of ITSM and created their own tribe. Product managers have their own way of looking at the world of digital products and services. So for PeopleCert to expand into their territory feels a little like stolen land without an acknowledgement. Even so, the purpose in doing this is mainly to address criticism that ITIL® has been too “operational” over the years, not focused enough on the product and service strategy, creation, design, and transition. I agree with this criticism and believe it’s the right thing to do to provide greater more comprehensive coverage of “this thing we do.”

This shift becomes apparent in a number of changes. The new ITIL® Digital Product and Service Lifecycle represents the Service Value Chain as a cycle of activities that move from the product management side of the model (Discover, Design, Acquire, Build, Transition) to the service management side of the model (Transition, Operate, Deliver, Support). This is a redux of the ITIL® version 3 Service Lifecycle within the context of the Service Value Chain Activities. I think it’s a more complete way of looking at the whole.

Another notable shift is a greater focus on role capabilities rather than organizational capabilities. This is apparent in the new course designations: Product, Service, Experience, Strategy, and Implementation. The first four are focused more on organizational roles than previous version of ITIL® while Implementation address the need for clear “how to” advice – a frequent criticism of ITIL® over the years. Developing best practices around role-based capabilities helps practitioners answer the question, “Where do I fit?”

Lastly, new ITIL® is “AI Native.” This is not a recommendation of specific AI technologies, but the development of recommendations that help organizations become disruptors rather than disrupted within increasingly VUCA environments. As with most ITIL® practices, the material related to AI provides solid recommendations that are designed to be timeless.

The Editorial Process

The process to create the books belonging to this version of ITIL® took more than a year of our time to complete. The authoring teams, led by two to three lead authors for each book, would write each version of the material in short two-week sprints. At the end, the version would be reviewed by the larger team for feedback and revision. Key ideas and concepts would be discussed in detail with decisions on what and what not to include going back to the core team. Surveys on contested ideas would be distributed between authoring sprints to settle sticky questions.

Between these sprints, the excellent PeopleCert editorial team would prepare the versions, clean them up, format them, and redistribute to the authoring teams. This process was very efficient, bringing to bear the collective wisdom of the experts around the room. Even though I’ve been in ITSM for three decades, I was in awe of the expertise. The process resembled a modified Delphi research model with the world’s leading experts in our field shaping the collective direction.

All of this adds up to a reshaping of our profession to broaden IT Service Management into Digital Product and Service Management – a long overdue upgrade to the venerable compendium of best practices we all know and love.

In ITSM, we’ve been talking about “products and services” for a long time. It seems as if these terms live together – you can’t state one without the other. But what do they really mean? Are they the same thing? How are they related? To figure this out, as usual, I’ll go off on a tangent older than most reading this post.

Forty years ago, Richard Clark wrote a seminal paper on instructional design in which he made the case that the medium of instruction had no effect on learning. He made this point famously when he stated, “The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition .” But would we get any nutrition if the truck never came?

Robert Kozma, who believed that the medium DID matter, would say “no.” He engaged in a friendly debate with Clark over the next twenty years (e.g., ) which played out in a myriad of journals. Is learning realized through the message or the medium that carries it? To this day, the question is still unsettled in the research. But for me, the question was clarified during conversation I had with my librarian wife the other day:

David: “What are you reading?”

Allyson: “A book…”

David: “Is it a good book?”

Allyson: “Yes, why do you ask?”

David: “How do you know it’s a good book?”

Allyson: “(getting annoyed) Because the ideas in it are interesting.”

David: “Do you value the physical book or the ideas the book conveys more?”

Allyson: “The ideas, naturally.”

David: “But would you have learned those ideas WITHOUT the physical book?”

Allyson: “Well, I don’t really need the physical book. I could’ve read the words somewhere else.”

David: “Like where?”

Allyson: “Like another book, or heard them through an audio book, or someone could have told me.”

David: “So in each case, you need the medium of the printed words, the recorded words, or the spoken words to get the ideas?”

Allyson: “Well, yes. You have to have some kind of medium to transfer the ideas.”

I believe the Clark-Kozma debate lingered because the debaters always took one side or the other, never thinking outside the two halves of the question. But the real answer is that both the medium and the message are necessary for learning. The message contains learning (i.e., value) for the learner, which is transferred through the medium.

This story has a lot in common with the products and services puzzle confronting ITSM professionals. To set it up, in the “good old days,” the difference between products and services was pretty clear. As an example, software designers produced software products. Services such as order fulfillment and technical support were left to the “operational” side of the house to deliver and support the product. There was a clear conceptual definition between products and services. Products were “things.” Services were “actions”.

These days, with the proliferation of digital “things”, the boundary between products and services (or development and operations) is not that clear. Software has become more service-oriented with the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In fact, many products are now delivered via the network. Other models (e.g., PaaS, IaaS, etc.) continue to evolve and gain dominance (that’s a lot of aaSes). Services contain both the thing being delivered and the delivery mode. So consulting services is a thing (i.e., advice) being delivered as a service (the engagement, communication, reports, etc.). Is there a difference between products and services, and if so, what is their relationship?

As true ITSM professionals, we can begin to answer this by asking from where does the value come? Is the value realized through the product or the service? I think digital products represent potential value to the consumer, but the value is only realized when it is delivered through a service. This service may take two forms – access or a service action related to the product. This is true even in the case of a good. The good must be delivered to a consumer for value to be realized. This delivery is a form of a service. Products by themselves are of no value in the same way that an axe is of no value unless you pick it up (i.e., access) and swing it (i.e., service action). Value is contained in products and delivered via services. You cannot provide value with only one – both product and service are necessary and related.

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