Average cost for a team of 6-8 people is around $56,000 per week! It only makes sense to ask ourselves what we are getting, or building, on weekly basis! In this blog post, we are diving into some of the myths and facts on product ownership.
MYTHProduct success is defined by on-time and on-budget delivery
FACTFor product owner, the ultimate failure is to deliver a product for which there is no real user. value, users, market fit are the most important things for a successful product delivery. You can have a product released on-budget and on-time but if no one is going to use it, you can consider it a 100% failure.
MYTH
It’s product owner’s job to put the items in the backlog
FACTCreating PBIs can be assigned to anyone! The product owner owns the backlog and delegates this to anyone they see fit. Product owner has one primary job: to maximise value by ordering/reordering the backlog – not putting items in the backlog.
Product owners are not feature factory (or feature author). Product owner needs to ask and facilitate the team to come up with feature. They should not get into nitty gritty of this, rather to build a good team to do this. The ultimate question for product owner is to ask themselves how much value they can bring!
MYTH
Scrum is an iterative delivery methodology
FACT- Scrum is not a methodology – it’s a framework
- It has a lot of missing pieces (not prescriptive) intentionally!?
- Scrum focuses on: transparency, inspection and adaption
- It is based on empirical evidence
Scrum helps us to look at our planning and optimise it by asking ourselves; are we doing too much planning or to little? Do we have too much details or too little.
Project management is one of the skills that product owner needs to possess but product management should not be confused with project management. Product owners needs to have continuous improvement mindset; they need to have value steam focus – not delivery focus.
| Value stream focus (product owners) | Delivery focus (project managers) |
|---|---|
| Vision Value Validation | Plan (time, budget, scope) Charter Milestone |
Product owners need to have and develop strong strategic understanding of product; chop and change is inseparable part of product management. What to change and when, and if… Product owners needs to have strategy and roadmap in their head. There are various type of product managements. They can be categorised into two main categories of reactive and proactive. Reactive POs only change after it’s needed and the product is going to fail at some point in time. They are generally “yes sayers” with less focus on adaption. On the other hand proactive POs (product CEOs, sponsors) they maximise value on high level. They do not write backlog but ask their team to come up with feature as previously mentioned.
