Companies often ask me how to find a good Product Owner. To start with, great Product Owners need to have a good business knowledge. It’s not about the product feature knowledge that much as your developers will have it as well, but it’s about understanding the overall business and market dynamics, the competitors, the existing product on the market. It’s about being able to create a business plan, understanding the customer needs. Product Owners need to have a sense of how we bring our product to the market. And finally, it’s also about being open to hear the feedback from the customers and change our plans accordingly.
The second area is about having a time to focus on being a great Product Owner. It needs to become your personal goal, so don’t combine it with anything else. After all, your ultimate job is to make the product successful so don’t worry, it will pay back. It takes time to develop different ways of creating Backlog items, it takes time to prioritize, but more importantly you need to have time to collaborate with people. Not only just with your developers, but more importantly with stakeholders and customers. In the traditional environments, we often believe that a Product Owner is a magical person who writes requirements, then throws them across the wall to developers to create and that’s it. But in reality when they catch it, they usually throw it back and say, “We don’t understand this, somebody should give us more details”. But that’s how it should never look like in agile space. Building a Backlog is about collaboration and co-creation with developers, stakeholders and customers. So you should never write backlog items without them. By collaborating and co-creating, people build the same understanding, alignment, and relationships among each other so then when they work on a particular item during the Sprint, they can actually be much more efficient. They ask clarifying questions directly, they don’t need a Product Owner to be in the middle. Having said so, the Product Owner could be seen more as a facilitative role, as a person who puts everybody together, who makes sure they can collaborate, who makes sure they all are aligned and share the same vision, who sets the priorities, who sets the product goals to be achieved, but actually who is not the team assistant that writes requirements. The power of Scrum is in creating teams that are close to the customer and understand their needs.
The next area for great Product Owners to be able to make a decision, be able to say “NO” to a feature. Product Owners who are weak in this and saying yes to every idea your stakeholders and customers come up with are not really good ones because their backlog keeps growing into unlimited size. And by the way, the more collaborative and inclusive you are as a team the worst it goes. So the most important thing Product Owners need to learn is to say “No, we are not going to do that now”. In order to say that you need to have a clear version, clear direction, good understanding of the customer need and market dynamics. 80% of the business value is only in 20% of functionality. Once you accept that, it’s relatively simple to say “We are going to do this now and the rest later or never.” And that’s quite a magical phrase. That’s how you really recognize if being a Product Owner is for you. Because if you can say that sentence with a big smile on your face, you are going to be a great Product Owner, if not, and if it’s only causing you frustration and pain, because you believe that everything needs to be done, the Product Owner role is not for you.
To summarize, you need strong business knowledge, authority and time, plus good negotiation, communication and facilitation skills. It’s a lot, but that’s the mix you need to develop to become a great Product Owner.