The four great challenges of Product Owners
Ordering your Product Backlog is determining your product strategy to maximize happiness. From there, you can represent it in a roadmap format as you need. Your product strategy is unique and resides in a changing environment. Unfortunately, there is no secret formula that will guaranty success.
Here are some perspectives to help you order your Product Backlog.
Review where your product stands today
Understanding where you stand today will help you define your way forward. Models are helpful to establish evaluation grids that help us compare ourselves with the market. Here are just a few examples:
- The Kano model: This model can help you assess your product-market fit, and which features appeal most to your customers.
- Porter’s 5 forces: This model can help you assess the various competitive forces at play in your industry.
- PESTLE analysis: This model can help you understand your market’s political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental environments.
- SWOT analysis: This analysis can help you assess your ability to evolve. It is particularly useful when used with one or more of the above models.
- Product life cycle: This model can help you understand the maturity of your product in your market. The type of work to be done varies if you’re just starting out in a market or if your product has been your cash cow for 20 years.
Visualize your assumptions
Understanding the various assumptions you make in your product strategy may guide you to decide which one to validate first.
Problem framing workshops are great tools to visualize those assumptions. They are also helpful in aligning stakeholders around your strategy.
Here are a few examples of problem framing workshops:
- Business Model Canvas: To explore your business hypotheses.
- Value Proposition Canvas: To explore your value hypotheses for a given type of stakeholder.
- Lean Canvas: To explore your key business and value assumptions.
- Opportunity Canvas: To explore your hypotheses around a new idea or feature.
- Lean UX Canvas: To explore your assumptions about your ability to achieve your business objective.
When assessing which hypothesis you want to validate first, you can use any criteria that suit your context. To help you, Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX, suggests the Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas.
Une fois l’hypothèse sélectionnée, nous vous suggérons d’effectuer le test le moins coûteux qui pourrait indiquer que votre hypothèse est vraie. Au fur et à mesure que vous obtenez des preuves de la véracité de l’hypothèse, investissez davantage dans l’idée. Continue as such until you can fully validate the assumption in production.
This approach is described in Gothelf’s model, the “Truth Curve”, and its aim is to help Product Owners invest a lot of time and money in big ideas that haven’t been proven, creating waste.
It’s perfectly normal to refute hypotheses. In fact, if you’ve never done it, what are you really learning?
Remember that your capacity to learn is more valuable than your capacity to plan
We are so used to doing plans that we often define performance by how closely we stick to them. The approach reinforces our belief that we have the “right” plan. Consequently, if we misunderstand the needs behind the plan or if its objective moves, we end up with an “Oops!” moment where we release a suboptimal product.
Fact is that in a complex environment where we try to increase happiness, plans do not hold. We are simply unable to accurately forecast what will happen. The question is no longer about following a plan, it is about validating frequently that we are still going in the right direction.
Now, let’s look at Team 1 who focuses on learning quickly through frequent releases. This produces the shortest path to our goal while enabling us to change direction quickly if the goal changes. In this scenario, ordering becomes less important as it is constantly revised.
This becomes even more apparent if you give the same Product Backlog to two different teams and provide them with the same definition of “happiness” for the same stakeholders with the same objective. The result is two different strategies. Is one better than the other?
The answer becomes “No” as both will quickly learn and adapt their Product Backlogs accordingly to move toward their Product Goal.
With this mindset, we refined our Product Backlog for the purpose of learning. We may use ordering models and users’ feedback to generate ideas of how to order, but we’ll focus on incrementally discovering those ideas instead of planning to realize them assuming they are good ideas. The Product will take shape as we learn how it generates happiness.
When in doubt, follow the golden rule of product management
Product Management literature states that successful products do not aim to please the Producers. Producers’ happiness is the result of the product’s success.
Looking at the picture below, we indicate that maximizing happiness in zone 1 is a pre-requisite to maximizing happiness for the Producers.
Society and Community members include influencers and potential critics. If we ignore those Stakeholders, we may start to see a negative image being developed of our product that will, in turn, reduce everyone’s happiness.
Makers create the product. Happy Makers innovate more, perform better, and engage more in making the product a success.
Clients pay for the product and they do so based on the perceived Users’ happiness. The price, the contract, and the warranty are some of the most important product features for Clients. Understanding their needs will help Product Teams get out of the “fix contract” trap.
Ultimately, however, your product success is directly linked to your ability to make Users happy. After all, solving the User needs is the focus of developing a product. As such, in order to maximize the happiness in zone 1, Product Teams will pay special attention to Users’ happiness.
Align your stakeholders around your strategy
Even the best strategy will fail if your stakeholders are not working in concert with you. Try to turn your Sprint Reviews into product strategy refinement sessions. By doing so, you will increase the transparency over your ordering and ensure alignment.
In some contexts, reaching agreement between producers on the order of the product book is a challenge in itself. Sometimes opinions differ; other times, requirements collide. Misalignment is detrimental to the product team’s ability to innovate. In these contexts, it may be preferable to focus on alignment rather than strategy, especially if you can inspect and adapt the product backlog. In the previous context, prioritization becomes more of a stakeholder management exercise than a genuine strategic exercise. Prioritization techniques such as the White Elephant or 25/10 can help product teams achieve this alignment effectively.
Product management training at Pyxis Doceo
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