Product Ownership Approaches
How do different environments affect our Product’s development.
Let’s talk about our good friend John Doe and his new role in Product. After several interviews, courses and product exercises he was finally offered a Product Owner position at ProductNation! On his first 30 days, he is on-boarded and presented to his team, stakeholders and product (along with its massive backlog).
John soon realizes that his opportunity to change the world is a little bit different from what he prepared for. There are conflicting stakeholder interests, management has not entirely embrace Agile, his team members are burned out and there are several commitments reaching their deadline.
Being new to the company and with an Agile mindset, John begins to assess the situation, focusing on value delivery. He begins by writing stakeholder requirements, explaining them to the team and negotiating how to deliver them as quickly as possible without compromising quality.
After 90 days, John’s team delivered 20 story points less than originally estimated (which made stakeholders and management upset). John handled an internal conflict and is now complaining he doesn’t have enough time or information to plan a successful Sprint.
I remember the first time I read Robbin Schuurman’s article Stances of the Product Owner the first thing that came to mind was “These misunderstood stances are exactly what management and stakeholders expect of John”. His responsibility is to ensure the product’s success by meeting customer expectations and management’s metrics (KPIs and project being on time, on budget and on scope).
The easiest path to follow is the one set by ProductNation’s culture: John has to be an effective Story Writer, Project Manager, Subject Matter Expert, Clerk, Gatekeeper and Manager. There is too much at risk to experiment being a Visionary, Collaborator, Customer Representative, Decision Maker, Experimenter and Influencer.
Then again, the preferred stances make sense only to those people who have the environment and seniority to implement them. Or do they? How can John foster team collaboration and customer feedback? Can he successfully meet expectations and maximize value?
Product Ownership
Just like Robbin mentions on his article, the preferred stances are related to constructive, positive and valuable attitudes seen on successful Product Owners. Having an Agile mindset helps to inspect and adapt different situations, which means that sometimes we’ll adopt one stance and sometimes we’ll adapt another one, all for the sake of value.
John can begin by elaborating the following:
Create a product goal
John’s stakeholders do not share a product goal or vision, each one thinks he/she is serving his/her customers properly based on their feedback. John as Product Owner, can meet with them and discuss why the product exists? what are our customer’s needs? what outcomes do we expect to achieve?
“A product is a vehicle to deliver value. It has a clear boundary, known stakeholders, well-defined users or customers”
Highlight the current state and define a future state
With a clear understanding of the problem, needs, constraints and risks, John can continue to elaborate the product’s current state and the desired future state. This allows stakeholders to find common ground and agree on the product’s future.
Communicate and over communicate
Once John has a clear set of stakeholder requirements, he can return to his team and begin collaborating on actionable tasks that will help achieve the product goal (estimation will only get better over time, don’t worry John).
Trainers like Stefan Wolpers have mentioned that most times when working as a Product Owner he showed up to the team with a single sentence to start the conversation.
Once the team has developed a plan to achieve the product goal, then John can return to the stakeholders and communicate the team’s opinion. What can be even better is for John to talk to customers, understand their pain-points and particular use cases, then go to the stakeholders with the team and customer’s feedback!
Product Leadership
Taking a leadership approach, fostering communication and collaboration between stakeholders (including team members) and customers could be complicated for John, especially in his current situation. But ultimately, he will gain better results creating a product culture that takes everybody’s opinion into account.
Product Ownership doesn’t have to follow a development framework, method or organizational model for it to be successful. It just needs to follow a goal and try whatever necessary to get there. Feedback loops and continuous improvement will make the journey easier, but we might need to wait for John to try it out and come back to us with his experience!
Now let’s talk about our other good friend Mary Jane and her challenges as Product Manager at WeAreProducts. After a long product discovery and development cycle Mary is getting her first reviews from “real” paying customers! The first lines on the majority of the comments read “WeAreProducts did not deliver what I was hoping for…”, “Nice sneak peak, can’t wait for the final version…”, “What in the world happened to WeAreProducts?…”.
How did Mary and her team missed the target? They were in constant communication with beta testers, stakeholders and marketing. Someone must have noticed the possibility of negative customer impact, should’ve they?
Mary rapidly began compiling customer data and requested marketing to publish a statement asking for feedback. Her team’s morale is clearly impacted, her stakeholders and investors are upset and WeAreProducts’ CEO called the product team to hold a retrospective. What could’ve Mary do to prevent this outcome?
Product Management is not just about launching great products, it’s about delivering a great experience that addresses a particular need in a feasible and viable way. Mary might have done everything right on paper, but what did her customers say during the discovery and development process?
Product Entrepreneurship
Some industries work on “secret projects” that don’t include customer feedback until they hit the market. This approach inherently carries risk but can also generate the most impact. Following Dan Olsen’s Lean Startup and How to Achieve Product-Market Fit, Mary could use the following:
Lean Product
- Identify target audience
Identifying a particular audience will help the team to focus on developing a solution for their particular needs. It’s way harder trying to please everybody.
2. Identify underserved customer needs
Analyze your competitors and truly engage your customer’s pain-points with their product. Avoid “cloning” solutions as this would barely deliver value.
3. Define value proposition
Once you have defined your customer’s expectations and your unique features, it’s time to begin crafting!
4. Specify MVP feature set
Don’t forget Mary:
Product Management is not just about launching great products, it’s about delivering a great experience that addresses a particular need in a feasible and viable way.
Work on building an experience that addresses a need, consider the technology required to make that happen and a business model that can benefit your stakeholders.
5. Create MVP prototype
Time to market, return on investment, payback period and other metrics are great tools to help you decide between the viability and risks associated to a project. Mary will need to negotiate with her stakeholders and engineering team on a Minimum Viable Product that delivers value to customers.
6. Test MVP with customers
This is it Mary! Time to ask for customer feedback! Then you can take that feedback and iterate until you’re ready to launch the first Product version.
Celebrate your Wins
Product Management can only be considered done when your product is retired from the market and its support ends. Until then, every milestone, launch and achievement should be celebrated! Mary would need to organize a party to let her team and stakeholders know what an awesome job they did.
So don’t worry Mary if you didn’t get it right the first time, just keep engaging with your customers, over communicate and continue to inspect and adapt.
Final Thoughts
Our two good friends John and Mary experience similar problems in different environments. Both follow their company’s standard process, both struggle to meet customer expectations and both try their best to do their job right.
John and Mary could question the need or goal behind their products, are they thinking on meeting deadlines? Satisfying stakeholders? Capturing and executing requirements on time, on budget and on scope?
If both could craft and champion a Product Goal, focus on the problem and not the solution, create a Product culture where everybody shares a purpose, communicate often and put their “customer hat” on, then value would be generated easier and more often.
John and Mary don’t necessarily have to challenge the Status Quo and call for a revolution. They can base their decisions on data (specially customer data) and ask their teams to experiment on a hypothesis. If it proves to generate the expected outcome, they can try with another experiment and continue until the product and process eventually become better.
Keep it up guys, if we fail fast we have the opportunity to apply our lessons learned and improve faster.
