Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Ownership (Geoff Watts' Agile Mastery Series)

by Geoff Watts

As Partnoy says, these players “procrastinate—at the speed of light” (para. 2).

In their 2000 paper, “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” they found that when presented with 6 different kinds of jam, 30 percent of people ultimately bought one of the jams. However, when presented with 24 types of jam, an incredible 97 percent of people ended up buying nothing. Iyenger and Lepper concluded that too many options made decision making more difficult.

Good product owners know that quickly delivering something that works and then learning from the feedback is the best way to ensure that the product is moving in the right direction. Great product owners are able to generate buy-in when stakeholders disagree and realise that not making a decision is still, in effect, making a decision—the decision not to act right now.

The last responsible moment is the time when the cost of not making a decision exceeds the cost of making a decision or, as Karl Scotland puts it, “The Last Responsible Moment is just before the Cost of Delay outweighs the Benefit of Delay” (2010, para.

DRIVEN product owners manage to strike a balance between making quick decisions and delaying commitments. When they get stuck, they recognize and consciously choose to tackle whatever is undermining their ability to make a choice, whether that’s a fear of failure, the desire to be perfect, too many options to choose from, a struggle with assertiveness, or something else.

People with Impostor Syndrome face the following challenges: An inability to internalise accomplishments. A feeling that they are a fraud, that other people have an overinflated view of them. A belief that their successes can be attributed only to luck or being in the right place at the right time. A fear of being found out or labelled a fraud. A larger focus on what they can’t do, rather than what they can do.

Great product owners know, however, that the best decisions take into account multiple viewpoints. They understand that people that disagree with them aren’t sitting in judgement but instead are offering a valuable perspective. They create teams of allies and dissenters and give equal voice to both groups.

Figure D-2. A decision-making matrix can help determine who should make a decision.

Figure D-3. Creating a Matrix of Influence can optimise stakeholder engagement.

Several factors make ruthless prioritisation difficult, especially for people who are new to the product owner role. The first is a tendency to want to keep everyone happy—to give in and try to give all the stakeholders at least some of the features they have requested.

Stakeholders, users, customers—even the development team—all have competing needs and compelling reasons why their proposed solutions should be the highest priority. When product owners try to take all of these needs into account at one time, they end up with a bloated backlog of must-do features and no way to decide which to do first. The resulting product, if the team can cobble one together, is likely to be a mixed-up mess rather than a targeted, purposeful release.

The second factor that interferes with effective prioritisation is that it is difficult to cope with loss, even if it’s only the loss of an idea. Once you have invested in something, even only to the point of imagining and writing a user story, you don’t want to see that effort wasted by cutting it. People can experience tangible grief over letting go—whether it’s letting go of a focus on a particular customer segment or of a favourite feature, even if it is only for right now. They fear, and sometimes rightfully so, that if they don’t push for their ideas, they will never be implemented. As a result, the product backlog grows and grows, while the product flounders.

At the lower end of the priority scale, extreme granularity begins to add less value again. For example, worrying about whether something is priority 199 or priority 200 isn’t worth it, especially

The enemy of the ‘best’ is often the ‘good’” (157). People have a natural tendency to want to say yes to everything and to hold on to every good idea. Yet good product owners know that in order to create the best product, they must say no (or at least not now) even to ideas they like and learn to let go.

Great product owners invest their energy in defining and communicating a cohesive, value-focused vision for the product so each feature’s contribution towards that vision can be assessed.

What factors do you consider when prioritising the product backlog? Value? Cost? Risk? Learning? Uncertainty? Novelty? Dependencies?

Sometimes, however, great product owners have to put data, analysis, and negotiation to one side and, for the good of the product, just decide and move on. The best product owners realise that this trump card is always there for them, but they play it only when it’s really necessary. Reset When You Struggle

Letting go of an idea is difficult for most people; product owners are no exception. If you struggle with being ruthless, don’t judge yourself harshly. Instead, acknowledge what is happening and reset.

Great product owners evaluate every feature’s value against a backdrop of clear product vision, and share that vision and their decisions with the stakeholders. Then, when the circumstances call for it, they are willing to ruthlessly make a choice and move forward, knowing that in doing so they are giving their product the greatest chance of success.

Firstly, there is usually a lag time between cutting quality and seeing the consequences, so we might not be able to spot it straight away. And if we can’t see it, we can’t fix it,” replied Tom.

“Secondly, working beyond team capacity sets unrealistic expectations about our speed while simultaneously slowing us down.”

“Two ways. Firstly, by creating a lower quality product we increase our maintenance costs. It’s going to be harder to add new functionality to the product because things don’t work as expected,” Tom explained. “And then, on top of that, the team will be overworked, so they will have lower energy and less morale.”

As technical debt rises, the team’s velocity falls.

Great product owners operate on the principle that “all plans are imprecise and will be proven wrong.” They also know that the further out into the future a team is planning, the greater the degree of inaccuracy. But even though a plan is destined to be wrong, it can still be useful. And often, merely the act of planning as a collaborative team, and the learning that happens in that space, is more valuable than the actual artefact of the plan.

Estimation is a complex and inherently inaccurate process that is beyond the scope of this book, primarily because it is not a product owner responsibility. However, it is important to understand that one of the principles of agile methods such as Scrum is that the people doing the work should do the estimating.

Anyone who has played poker knows the term “pot committed,” the realisation that even if you are holding a losing hand you cannot fold because you have bet so much money already. Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy, a tendency to justify spending more and more money or time on a bad investment based on the amount that has already been spent.

Sometimes the project is achievable but the chosen delivery team is not capable of delivering high enough quality at a fast enough pace.

In these situations, the product owner has a tough decision to make. They have the opportunity to replace the team (or perhaps certain members of the team) with one that is more capable or, if they are taking more of a long-term view, they may choose to support the development of the team and facilitate their upskilling through training or experience.

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Confucius

However, as discussed in “Decisive,” DRIVEN product owners also understand that they cannot realistically gain all the knowledge they’d like before making every decision. They know that some decisions will have to be made using incomplete information. So great product owners couple research and knowledge with the opportunities to learn that an agile process offers them.

Good product owners trust their instincts. Great product owners find data to test their ideas.

The only problem is, we all see events, people, and actions through the filter of our own biases.

As the essayist and memoirist Anais Nin famously said: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”. In other words, we often look at a problem or solution and see only what we expect to see. That means that even when we are attempting to learn about others, we may be unable to see through the filters we have in place. Great product owners, therefore, also cultivate an awareness of their own blind spots by paying attention to their cognitive biases. Put

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cognitive biases are thinking patterns that can affect people’s ability to make good judgement calls or to interpret information effectively.

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Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s own preconceptions.

Confirmation bias is pernicious. In fact, a study from the University of Iowa found that once people make their minds up about something they are unlikely to change their minds—not because they are stubborn but because they only see the evidence that confirms what they believe to be true. This is because people tend to subconsciously seek out information that backs up their beliefs while simultaneously screening out anything contradictory.

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This kind of bias appears not only in market-related decisions or predictions but also with regards to impressions of people and relationships.

If product owners make up their minds about someone based on initial impressions and don’t critically re-assess that opinion then they risk long-term consequences, including the decreased levels of trust and rapport that could prevent them from uncovering better solutions.

Great product owners learn to overcome this natural tendency by purposefully seeking out differing opinions. They might intentionally put someone on their product owner team, for instance, who they know sees the world through a very different lens. Or when conducting a backlog grooming meeting or a sprint review, they might ask for someone to play devil’s ad...

Henry Ford is often credited with saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This is used as evidence that it is better to predict what your customers need rather than what they currently understand they want based on their current paradigm.

Ford might not have actually said this, the point is still valid: How can people be expected to communicate that they want a car when a horse is all they know?

This is a relevant argument for revolutionary breakthroughs but perhaps less so for evolutionary improvements—where the customer is well aware of what is working well and what is not. In those cases, it is probably best to do dil...

Professor Noriako Kano developed the Kano model of customer satisfaction in the 1980s.

The responses are then categorised according to five qualities: Must, Linear (or “One Directional”), Attractive, Indifferent, and Reverse.

Figure I-1. A Kano Model is one method for researching what customer’s want.

Linear features are also often referred to as one-dimensional features. They can be best described as “the more of this feature you have, the more satisfied the customer is.”

To return to the hotel example again, receiving a complimentary bottle of wine or box of chocolates would likely excite a customer, and thus could classify as an attractor. Attractors can have such a positive effect on the customer that they may even be willing to ignore one or two missing threshold features. One note to be aware of here, though, is that exciter features can migrate very quickly into the threshold category. The next time I check in, I could well expect that bottle of wine or box of chocolates!

Figure I-2. Use the Kano Model to categorise potential features.

American anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”

In other words, knowing you should want something doesn’t always translate into actually wanting something enough to purchase it. In fact, I can think of several products where all the data has pointed towards a successful product but it has not sold.