Product Owners, Santa and other goblins

Marko Taipale / Gosei @ AfterWork / Futurice

“Don’t stop; keep challenging”

Mythbusting Product Owner role

Pat “the PO”

Ok, so what is a PO?

Bob “the boss”

You are now the PO

.. eh, I dunno...

Right answer?

So what is the problem that PO

should solve?

Have a (product) vision and business plan

Know the cost and value in order to prioritize - be responsible for P/L

Listen all stakeholders

Support the team

Understand the risks

Focus on building the right thing

It is all about communication!

That is way too much for one to

handle..

Why do you need a role for all that?

the Company should know and manage that anyway..

You want my honest opinion?

We do not need product owner, we need product ownership as a way of

1) making decisions2) understanding ROI

and business model 3) managing risks... etc...

Sure

It is an abstraction within Scrum method. But it has its use as Firewall

organizational pattern.

Is PO any good for any situation?

.. but that’s about it.

Firewall?

..to protect the team from outside world

We study our organization and the business as a system

.. and then do what we need to do.

So how do we find out what to do next?

System?System is a collection of parts

that interact and influence each other in order to fulfill the purpose of the system

An organization is human centered system

Context for Pat

• New Product Business Development within existing Product Development Company

• We need to figure out what to build

• And then we need to figure out how to build it

... about...the vision

Do you acknowledge that?

Sure

mmm. . What then?

“Vision is just an opinion stated passionately”

we need to validate what we need to do in order to have a business

Is it ok if I create Customer Development team around that?

mmm. . Ok...

That team will understand the value..

And for the cost I will connect the Customer Development team with the

Development team.

Ok.

mmm. . Ok...

One more thing..

Customer Development team meet (and consist) the stakeholders.

Some people in the team will be part of the development team. That way there is nice support available for the dev team

too...

Yeah?

And...

The Customer Development team will understand the risk by studying the

market and being connected to dev team.

They will be ensuring we are building the right thing by executing Lean Startup

cycle: dev team will feedback user data.

You know what...

You said that it is all about communication...

Yeah?

Of course it is...

I have some news for you..

ALL the information in the world

The Development Team

PO

ALL the information in the world

The Development Team

PO

Why to create such a bottleneck?

Customer DevelopmentTeam

The Development Team Much better!

Innovation space

You know the best part?

You do not need me! Nor you need to send me to the expensive certification programs.. You can actually execute this

without any new role or people...

What’s that?

So can I start today?

Study your system

Study your system

Forget RIGHT or WRONG

Don’t stop; Keep challenging