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

by Geoff Watts

Good product owners delay when they can. Great product owners decide when they must.

Decide What’s Making the Decision Difficult

In uncertain environments it can be incredibly valuable to adopt the general principle of delaying as long as possible in order to allow yourself maximum time to gather enough data to make the best decision.

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.

In situations where a number of viable options exist, one way to narrow down the possibilities is to allow the multiple options to progress concurrently for a set amount of time. This is called set-based decision making. Set-based decision making could involve prototyping various packaging designs and testing the market, A-B testing a new website design, or running two call-centre scripts in parallel and gathering feedback regarding which is the most effective.

Edison once famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

If you knew that it was impossible to make a perfect decision, how would that help you?

Good product owners trust themselves to make the tough calls. Great product owners know when to call for help.

Decide How You Will Decide

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

Collaboration requires more time, energy, diplomacy, and patience than deciding alone, though, so product owners can’t afford to make every decision through collaboration—it should be reserved only for those decisions that are complex and require a great deal of buy-in.

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

“A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others” Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

great product owners understand the need to mercilessly reject certain features and even products, at least for now, in favour of those that are more valuable.

Good product owners know what is needed. Great product owners know what can wait.

“The reality is, though, that if everything is high priority, nothing is high priority. This kind of priority inflation makes it extremely difficult to do what’s best for the product.”

if everything truly is important, then it shouldn’t matter which one is done first.

As the old adage from Aesop’s Fables goes: “Please all, and you will please none.”

The enemy of the ‘best’ is often the ‘good’”

Good product owners take calculated gambles. Great product owners also know when to walk away.

Fold a Losing Hand

What can you do to ensure that your reactions to information are more calm and measured?

Great product owners surround themselves with teams that are cross-functional and that represent multiple levels of experience.

Great product owners operate on the principle that “all plans are imprecise and will be proven wrong.”

Great product owners tend to see the removal of impediments as opportunities to help the team deliver better and quicker and so decide to join in the effort of impediment removal themselves rather than simply leave it to a ScrumMaster.

The best product owners tend to take a long-term, developmental approach to relationships within the development organisation but know how to make the tough decisions when they are warranted.

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

As the essayist and memoirist Anais Nin famously said: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”.

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

It is very easy for product owners to be misinformed by data that confirms what they already believe to be true. When this happens, product owners end up defining the product as they think it should be rather than creating the product that consumers and users actually want.

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.

valid: How can people be expected to communicate that they want a car when a horse is all they know?

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

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

“Research tells you facts but it doesn’t tell you anything behind the facts,”

“Customer feedback is the basis for ideas. Customer data is the basis for decisions.”

“If the product is going to fail, then I would rather it fail in month 2 than month 22”

Good product owners know enough to make decisions. Great product owners know enough to ask questions.

what I refer to as CHILD questions, so called because they share a number of key characteristics that just so happen to spell out CHILD. Great product owners ask questions that are curious, humble, illuminating, limitless, and direct.

To paraphrase Stephen Covey, most people listen with the intent to reply.

earlier, good product owners know when to trust the experts and don’t feel the need to figure everything out themselves.

Great product owners are cautious, though, about when and how they ask questions. They look for context clues and notice non-verbal clues, like body language. They are careful always not to confuse being direct for being blunt, disrespectful, or putting someone under pressure.

To enable effective decisions to be made, great product owners take the time to ensure that both they, the rest of the team, and if possible the other stakeholders are as informed as possible.

A Brainstorm Battle is another way teams share information. A brainstorm battle is a creative problem solving and analysis technique I have used with a number of teams to help them collaboratively consider, critique and compare alternative ways to address a situation.

“In matters of style, swim with the tide. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Thomas Jefferson

A good product owner is reliable and dependable. A great product owner knows flexibility is essential for strength.

There’s an old African proverb that says, “The wind does not break a tree that bends.”

They are prepared to sacrifice a certain amount of focus on the task and team performance in order to achieve harmony.

Figure V-1. Good product owners are aware of their preferred leadership style.