Tom Peters was recently quoted as saying: “It’s always ‘the people’. It may be glib, but in this instance I don’t care. Network, keep your promises, behave decently. You are as good as your relationships. Period. Short term. Long term. Good times. Tough times. This is the time (though all times are, in fact, the time) to over invest in relationship building and maintenance.”
Although this is generally true in life, it is also particularly true of the relationships between product owners and stakeholders, users, and the team.
What kind of product owner responsibilities can be discharged through good working relationships between them and stakeholders?
1. Identify, aggregate and prioritise stakeholder commercial objectives and expectations.
2. Play a leadership role in determining product strategy and direction.
3. Influence or negotiate key strategy decision points and milestones.
4. Identify, establish and maintain, strategic relationships with key internal and external decision-makers and stakeholders.
5. Form and maintain the product vision.
6. Identify, contract, and maintain, business relationships that defend the product against strategic threats, create defensible competitive advantages, profitably grow existing business, and exploit or create new market opportunities.
7. Develop innovative product recommendations based on commercial, technical, and legal assessments.
8. Participate in developing business cases.
9. Identify and drive corporate themes through the product.
My view is that these responsibilities should themselves be treated with agility: In other words meet them in the context of the product, the business, and the other roles in the organization, like Product Managers for example.
A long one instead
How do product owners sense they are moving towards their objective of meeting stakeholder expectations?
Spend time with them. Apart from day-to-day interactions with stakeholders I usually encourage product owners to host regular sessions with them to in order to articulate key business risks and opportunities.
Having something sensible to say to busy executives who have committed their valuable time means that beforehand product owners should have mapped their products’ ‘DNA’ to provide a framework to discuss current and future product initiatives. It may prove handy to refer to a conceptual model, and a trading community model, during these sessions as well.
In my opinion nothing creates a visceral connection between product owners and their product like a business case and vision. Although products owners groan when I say they should write and maintain these artifacts, they are not the 100-page tomes of the past.
Mark Twain once apologized to his readers: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This shouldn’t be the approach product owners take with these documents: 3 pages for a business case and 4 for a vision. The outcome of the stakeholder sessions should be that the content of these documents is confirmed and updated.
Distilling out the product vision into a goal model is also a useful exercise, I’ve found.
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