- The Misunderstood Stances of a Product Owner
- The Preferred Stances of a Product Owner
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Preferred Stances of a Product Owner
The misunderstood or nonpreferred stances of a Product Owner should be countered with preferred stances. Based on coaching and training thousands of Product Owners and product managers for more than a decade, we’ve learned about various stances that can help Product Owners to be more successful. The preferred stances are related to the constructive, positive, and valuable stances that we have seen many successful Product Owners display. The preferred stances are the Visionary, the Collaborator, the Customer Representative, the Decision Maker, the Experimenter, and the Influencer. Let’s dive into the preferred stances of the Product Owner!
The Visionary
The Visionary is also referred to as the inspirator, challenger of the status quo, the dreamer, or the imaginative Product Owner.
Visionary Product Owners have a clear vision (or dream) for the future, they actively challenge the status quo, and are generally seen as inspiring leaders to follow. They have a relentless focus on what can be instead of on what is. It is their mission, vision, passion, and inspiration that is appealing for many people to follow.
Not everyone has the ability to envision a faraway and very different future, and that’s okay. A vision doesn’t always have to be a “10 years from today, put a man on Mars” kind of vision. Some visions are big, others are small—and not every vision necessarily succeeds. The main quality of a Visionary is the ability to share their vision in a way that motivates their team to work toward that goal. So, be inspired by Visionaries; consider what you might learn from them, what makes them effective, and what they might improve; and then improve your own Visionary stance as a Product Owner.
The Collaborator
The Collaborator is also referred to as the team player and team worker.
Product management is a team sport. To represent customer needs effectively, and to translate those needs into a valuable product, Product Owners need to collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders, teams, and departments. A Collaborator Product Owner tends to support people in their own discovery process, whether it’s about defining goals, clarifying Product Backlog items, or analyzing customer needs.
Collaborators are team players who place the well-being of the team ahead of the well-being of themselves. A team with members who act cooperatively and seek to achieve the common goal functions better than a team with members who focus only on their own individual goals. Collaborators are open and transparent. They proactively share information, insights, and knowledge. They listen to understand, not to respond. They allow others to do what they are good at, and they do whatever they can to help the team succeed.
The Customer Representative
The Customer Representative is also referred to as the customer advocate, voice of the customer, user representative, user advocate, or voice of the user.
Customer Representative Product Owners are the go-to people for those in the organization who want to gain an understanding of what customers (and/or users) are looking for in the product or service for which the Product Owner is responsible.
Product Owners who take the stance of the Customer Representative tend to focus on helping other people (Developers or others) to understand what customers need, what their challenges are, what pains and gains they have. When taking the Customer Representative stance, the Product Owner tends to explain how the team’s work affects customers, users, and business processes.
The Decision Maker
Decision Makers help the stakeholders and team to keep time-to-market short by keeping decision-making time short. All sorts of decisions must be made daily. Some can be delegated to the Scrum Team or stakeholders; others must be made by the Product Owner.
The term decision (“act of deciding”) was coined in the mid-fifteenth century from the Latin decisionem:
Decisionem (nominative decisio), “to decide, determine”; literally “to cut off.”1
Making decisions is about “cutting off” choices—cutting off some other course of action. It may sound limiting, but it’s not. It’s liberating. Creating products presents us with endless options and possibilities, but at some point, we need to make some decisions and commit to next steps.
What do great Decision Makers do? Well, they listen! Great Decision Makers make sure the other party feels heard and understood. Next time someone voices concerns over a decision, try to note whether you (a) negate their concern: “That’s not happening”; (b) minimize it: “That’s not a problem”; (c) top it: “Compared to what I had to do, . . .”; or (d) interrupt them in the middle of their sente——.
The Experimenter
Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla; these are some of the greatest scientists of all time. If not for people like Nikola Tesla, then maybe you wouldn’t have been able to read this book and maybe we wouldn’t have written it in the first place. These and other scientists, innovators, and Experimenters are the driving force of innovation.
When taking the stance of an Experimenter, Product Owners explain what we know AND what we don’t know. They state hypotheses and assumptions instead of user stories and requirements. They see the work that the team does as experiments to discover new and hidden value rather than executing and delivering set-in-stone work packages. Experimenters understand that there is more unknown than known and therefore feel the need to try new things: explore, innovate, and experiment.
The Influencer
The Influencer is also referred to as the politician.
Some of the most famous and influential leaders of all time include people like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. These gentlemen are in all the top-ten lists of the best politicians, Influencers, world changers, and so on. Indeed, these leaders have all had a big impact on their people, countries, and/or the world. Most of these people eventually were elected to positions of power, which offered them even more opportunities to change the world. However, they all started with no authority, but they were visionary, inspirational people and, above all, great Influencers.
Product Owners who are great Influencers get things done without exercising formal authority over a person or team. Great Influencers act and speak in ways that may hardly be noticed when present but are dearly missed when they are gone.
Influencers help the stakeholders to align around the product vision, strategy, goals, and objectives. Influencing the stakeholders and Scrum Team is a hard but very important job. Influencers uses effective communication, negotiation, and persuasion to get people to join the cause. Influencers are aware of their environment, both the official and unofficial reporting structures, and they know who influences whom.
Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.
—Winston Churchill