I recently gave a talk about Effective Product Ownership. I started by having people identify what they thought were the characteristics of an “effective” Product Owner. Most of the terms that came up were things like “leader”, “communicator”, and “negotiator.” While those are good characteristics, I find them a little too generic when it comes to Product Ownership. What it hints at is that people, even some Product Owners, may not know how to be effective Product Owners. This was actually confirmed when I asked a couple quick questions. First, I asked how may Products Owners are here tonight? A collection of hands went up. Second, I asked how many of you feel you’re an effective Product Owners. Only one hand stayed up. I was surprised that I got such an honest answer. I fully expected that people would try to keep their egos intact by keeping their hands up.
What I often find is that Product Owners seem to grasp the Product Owner role defined by Scrum and they play the role every day, but few of them seek to truly master the role. Why? Could it be that a good number of Product Owners are blessed with the role by management without actually getting the chance to opt into the role? Could it be that Product Owners don’t get the necessary training they need? Could it be that Product Owners don’t feel safe enough to experiment with techniques to find out what works and what doesn’t. My guess is it’s a little bit of all of those and maybe a few more things mixed in.
During the talk, we discussed what I find to be a more effective way of looking at value. Most Product Owners are familiar with the concept of taking a “Dual View”. In other words, looking both “inward” at what’s valuable to the business and “outward” at what’s valuable to the customer. In my experience, however, the Dual View ignores a key piece of the equation. Instead, I believe Product Owners need to take a “Triple Value View”. Triple Value View includes value from the “business view”, the “customer view”, and the “team view”. Product Owners that don’t strive to include team view value in their Product Backlogs aren’t valuing the team. Sure they value that the team produces working software, but that’s value produced by the team. That’s not sustainable without putting value back into the team. In fact, teams without a “value in” component are likely to burn out, suffer from high turnover, or coast along generating average performance. These are all things that impact how well the team produces the working software that supports the Product Owner’s vision.
If you’re a Product Owner, I encourage you to seriously consider taking a “Triple View”. I believe it’s crucial to creating a healthy balance in a Product Backlog. A Product Backlog that delivers value both incrementally and sustainably.
For more info on taking a “Triple Value View”, you can view the slides from the talk. The slides will also help answer the question “why is there a picture of a parking meter in this post.”
Thanks for reading.
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