Help! I'm a Product Owner

(And I don't know what I'm doing !?)

It's not uncommon in organisations undergoing IT transformations for Product Owners to be appointed from the business and be expected to do that role alongside their 'day job'. Over the years, I've come across several behaviours common to successful product owners that can help you to get the most out of your interactions with the technical teams.

This role doesn't have to take up a huge amount of your time. You can set up your technical teams for success by giving them the context and boundaries needed to make many of the day to day decisions without you. This frees up your time to focus on the big-picture ideas and still get the day-job done.

My top tips to get you started:

1. Bring the customer to life

2. Describe success

3. Define the boundaries

4. It's not all on you

Bring the Customer to Life

It's likely you've been chosen to be a product owner because you work closely with customers and understand their needs. Maybe you've worked on the support desk, you handle customer complaints or perhaps you've even been a customer yourself in the past.

On the other hand, most technical teams, at least when the transformations get started, are very far removed from customers and their knowledge tends to be anecdotal, dated or just plain wrong.

The most important thing you can do as a new product owner, is to share that customer experience with your teams. Jump on a video call, or get everyone in the room together and tell them what it feels like to use your company's product or service. Talk about the pain points, the success stories, what doesn't work and what causes the most frustration. It's helpful to bring in real world examples from yourself or customers you've spoken to directly (minding out for privacy of course - you don't want to be naming specific customers). The teams will be curious, so allow a good amount of time for questions. If need be, do this over a couple of sessions a few days apart to give everyone some thinking time in between.

If you've doing this on a video call, I'd highly recommend recording it so that new team members can view it when they join. It will help them get up to speed on what the team is trying to achieve without needing to spend time with you one on one.

Describe Success

It's important to make the goals very clear, so everyone is working towards the same outcome. If you've got metrics that you're measured on, perhaps reducing support tickets or time spent on customer complaints, share these with the team and explain which ones are the highest priority. It might seem obvious how these metrics relate to customer success, but not everyone will have your business experience, so make sure to tie the two together explicitly. If you are using metrics like support tickets show the team how and when these are measured, go back a few years/months and show the trends over time. This all helps to set the context and makes sure the technical teams understand the importance and relevance of what's being measured.

If you're not using metrics, you may have personal or team objectives that align with the work the technical team is doing. So share these. Talk about what good looks like, where you are right now as a business and where you want to be. Be clear about how quickly or slowly you expect things to improve. Share how the work their doing or plan to do will impact you and your customers. You want the teams to be really clear on what they're aiming for and what success looks like. That way, they can make a lot of decisions on their own without needing your input at every step of the way.

If you don't already have them, a good first task for the team might be to develop some dashboards that allow everyone to track progress against your goals.

Define the Boundaries

Setting the boundaries is as important as defining success for allowing technical teams to get the work done without needing your support every day. Your teams need to understand what can be changed and what can't or wont.

You're probably not the only product owner, so one of the most important boundaries to set, is what your scope of ownership is and what falls under other teams and product owners. It might be specific products, particular areas of the business or particular areas of a product. Either way, be clear to the teams what falls under your remit for decision making and what lies with other people.

As well as system boundaries, you might have time boundaries as well. For instance, financial organisations and products often have hard deadlines that align with the tax year-end. Be clear about these deadlines and what exactly needs to be delivered. These are often very tough for technical teams to navigate as they appear to be fixed-time, fixed-scope deadlines, so you may need to spend some time to figure out what absolutely can't be missed and what could be done the next week or month.

It's not all on You

Be mindful that you're not alone and you're not expected to know everything.

Taking the last one first, your technical team shouldn't (and most likely doesn't) expect you to know everything. It's ok to have to go ask your manager or your colleagues or just to take some time to figure out an answer. It's part of the process and the technical team will usually have other work to get on with. Sometimes the answer just wont be important and it's ok to let the team make the choice instead of you. In the tech world, most decisions can be reversed (although there is almost always a time penalty in doing so), so if you do get it wrong, it can usually be changed later.

Finally, this is a team game and you're not expected to have all the ideas yourself. If you implement the first three points on this list, you may well find that the technical team starts to have suggestions of their own for how to improve the customer experience. Embrace this process, even if the initial ideas from the team aren't that great. Help them understand why the ideas aren't great - perhaps you'll need to add some boundaries, improve on your definition of success or elaborate more on the customer experience - and over time the suggestions will improve and you'll have a ready supply of ideas for the next planning session alongside your own.

If these tips resonate with you or your organisation, please do share and if you'd like to know more about how I can support you and your teams, you can book an initial consultation to discuss your situation.