The four great challenges of Product Owners
In 2010, a group of Google researchers released the HEART framework, a tool for tracking user experience to assess customer satisfaction and emotional connection. The “H” stands for “Happiness”.
Since then, customer happiness has become the symbol of customer satisfaction and loyalty. So it’s no surprise that the Harvard Business Review published an article in 2016 claiming that an emotional connection with your customers is more important than customer satisfaction.
When applying those principles to all Stakeholders, we realize that Product Owners have the greatest job in the world. They are devoted to maximizing the happiness of their Stakeholders.
That challenging task of discovering what makes everyone happy becomes the heart of Product Ownership. The task comes in two parts; first, understanding what makes people happy, and then, discovering what makes Stakeholders happy.
Understanding what makes people happy
In 2016, Harvard Business Review published an article called Elements of Value. The article summarizes research conducted by Bain & Co on how customers perceive value.
The article introduces thirty different needs, named “elements of value”, that customers may consider when making a purchasing decision. Each element is detailed interactively at Bain & Co.
These elements of value provide insight on what people look for to be happy, from the basic functional needs like “make money” all the way up to “feel like a society contributor”. They represent a great model when looking for what makes our Stakeholders happy.
Chris Lukassen and Robbin Schuurman’s Practical Product Management for Product Owner provides additional examples of the application of the Elements of Value.
The research not only provides the elements of Value, it also highlights the importance of understanding stakeholder needs and the critical role they play in the success of an organization.
Discovering what makes Stakeholders happy
Believing that we know what makes people happy is a common fallacy in the industry. In fact, psychologist Dan Gilbert’s research on happiness found that, as humans, we are quite poor at guessing what makes people happy, including ourselves.
Here are a few tips to help discover what makes our Stakeholders happy.
- Connect with Stakeholders
In her book Continuous Discovery Habits, product expert Teresa Torres suggests that finding what makes people happy is a continuous cycle of learning. She promotes a continuous stream of tests to validate ideas and assumptions starting with simple weekly conversations. By “conversations”, she does not mean “formal interviews”; she means real conversations where Stakeholders share their stories about the product.
By developing their knowledge of the Elements of Value, Product Owners will become more effective at detecting them within those stories. Normally, Makers may also interact with your Users, your Clients and your Producers. All can benefit from potentially being part of the conversation.
- Consider the product backlog as a list of needs to be met
Often Product Backlogs consist of tasks and features to build. Writing Product Backlog items this way assumes that we understand the needs of our Stakeholders. The danger is building a solution that does fit the problem.
By framing your work as needs, we can direct the conversation around “How will solving this need make our Stakeholder happier?” and “What element of value are we targeting?”
This way, when you receive a feature request from a Stakeholder, your instinct will be to reverse engineer it to find the reason behind the request.
- Avoid the “whys”
Although we strive to understand the reasons behind our Stakeholders’ decisions and stories, the question “Why” is often inappropriate to ask. For example, if a Stakeholder comes in with a feature request, asking “Why?” might lead to a “because I can”, or a “because it is my job”. In this scenario, one could ask better questions, such as:
- For what reasons do you think this is a good idea?
- How will we know if your idea is a success?
- How will this help us move toward our Product Goal?
- What would happen if it did not get developed?
- Be mindful of stereotypes
Sometimes we use stereotypes to save time. Unfortunately, they also blind us to the truth. To be effective, Product Owners need to remain judgment free. As an example, we may believe that Producers always seek a high financial return on their investment; however, they may have other motivations such as recognition, ambition, or risk mitigation.
Challenge 3: How do we know if our stakeholders are happier?
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