Three Keys to Successful Product Ownership

The Product Owner is both one of the most important roles in Scrum and often the most difficult to fill. In this post, I will explore a few aspects of successful product ownership that are often done poorly or not at all.

Manage Both the Big Vision and the Small Batches

Keeping a balance between the development of product qualities that will fulfill the business case and the tactical execution of low-level features is perhaps the most important skill possessed by a Product Owner. The difficulty in simultaneously doing both of these things well often leads to an actual split in the role, where a “Strategic” or “Chief” Product Owner focuses on the big picture, and the “Tactical” or “Proxy” Product Owner works with individual teams attending to the details of execution. Tools like story mapping, product trees and personas are commonly applied at the big picture level by Strategic POs, while sketches, wireframes, process flows and various collaborative modeling techniques are generally employed by Tactical POs to help teams better understand and execute the details.

Strategic product ownership is focused on garnering feedback and testing the project's assumptions at the vision and business case level, while tactical product ownership should align the whole team against small batches of work within sprints to ensure the best execution possible at the detailed level.

Test the Project’s Assumptions

Business cases are often presented as foregone conclusions: Build the features, and they will come. However, there is no shortage of failed and unloved products to prove that this is nonsense. Projects are built upon more or less educated guesses of what the market and stakeholders need and desire, and it is the Product Owner’s job to test and refine these assumptions, thereby guiding change through objective data.

Techniques such as customer development in the "Lean Startup" approach focus on stating your assumptions in such a way that they can be tested, and then using feedback from these tests to adjust the project’s focus. The simple process of coming up with metrics that represent the product’s desired qualities and impact areas also can be of tremendous help when attempting to balance diverse needs across disharmonious stakeholders, as it forces a focus on overall project needs rather than individual features. In essence, the why must precede the how.

Use the Whole Team

When Scrum was first formulated, a joke cast the “team” as committed “pigs” while the Product Owner (along with general stakeholders) was dubbed a merely involved “chicken.” This is an unfortunate place to draw the line, because these two roles work best as a tight-knit partnership. Scrum teams already play an active role in design and feature elaboration, and the best products come from fully engaged teams, not ones that simply wait for their orders or ones design in a vacuum.

Collaborative modeling techniques, where designs are created and refined by small groups rather than individuals, are common in such environments. Finding the right balance between giving the team a “final, approved” design to develop vs. involving them deeply in the design process itself isn’t automatic or consistent across teams, but it is the only way to maximize both the efficiencies so often touted in Agile methods with product innovation, effectiveness and quality.

I hope you've found this post useful. If you have any other questions about how to be an effective Scrum Product Owner, share them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer all of them in future posts.

What will it take to transform management? Look to the Polio Eradication Model.

In a few days, I'll be leaving behind the balmy weather in Chennai and heading to #Stoos in Switzerland. Our Stoos Gathering attendees will be deliberating on the issue of accelerating the transformation of management. We'll likely be asking questions like, "How can we accelerate the transformation of management away from creaky, dysfunctional models of the past and towards modern, dynamic in the present?"

Or "How can we catalyze widespread change in management to better meet the challenges of our turbulent times?"

Some days ago, I blogged about some of the models under consideration, and indicated that all of the approaches are essentially humanistic and systemic. So, whether we consider slightly older models like Jim Highsmith's Agile Project Management model or the Declaration of Inter-dependence; or more recent ones like Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 and Steve Denning's Radical Management, I believe the required transformation from current management state to future state is less about the mechanics, and more about the fundamentals.

How can we transform from older industrial-style management with its mechanistic command-and-control to newer "light-touch" humanistic management with decentralized or distributed control? In the agile world, we have certainly seen many companies initiate and sustain agile management and agile development transformations. The Forrester Group reports more and more organizations have initiated agile transformations world-wide. In my last blog post, I referred to this as creating a playground of productivity. In response, @stevedenning points out that the bigger question is, "How can we sustain the transformation?" I've spent the last few days in preparation for #Stoos: reviewing available models, reviewing the comments surrounding the Stoos gathering and perhaps most important, doing some personal reflection and retrospection on that very question.

While mulling the question, and perhaps enabled by my current surroundings, I recalled a very successful worldwide movement: the Polio Global Eradication Initiative. I first learned about this initiative when, on a flight to India some months ago, I sat next to a gentleman from Boston who was leading a U.S based team of volunteers from Rotary International. The goal of the initiative is to completely eradicate this often fatal and always debilitating disease from the earth.

Rotary International is one of the four spearheading partners in the initiative, and it is heart-warming to see volunteers from all over the world fund their own way, and team with local organizations and volunteers to help vaccinate children in the remaining hotspots.

The key partners: the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have mobilized thousands of volunteers, and managed and coordinated and managed their efforts in alignment with clear strategy with four pillars:

1. Routine immunization
2. Supplementary immunization
3. Surveillance
4. Targeted "mop-up" campaigns

The results are impressive. Per UNICEF, over the past 20 years, there has been a 99% reduction in polio cases.

I think we have a lot to learn from this model that brings public and private organizations; and governments and individuals together to work towards a common goal.

My thoughts on using the polio eradication initiative as a model for a global movement to transform management coming up in the next blog post.