The Preferred Stances of a Product Owner

This book has taken you through the six preferred stances of a Product Owner. Becoming a great Product Owner is an amazing, yet never-ending journey. The tools, practices, techniques, and concepts from this book will help you along that journey, but there is much work to be done. You don’t become a great product leader by simply attending a two-day course or reading this book. Continuous development of yourself, your product team, your company, and your knowledge and skills is critical to building products that customers will love.

Thank you for taking the time and undergoing the journey through this book and the Product Owner stances. As you continue to learn and grow as a Product Owner, you’ll find that applying the right stance to the right situation becomes second nature to you. To that end, memorizing these six simple sentences can help you to quickly assume the best stance, as needed, in your daily work:

• Visionary: It’s not about where we are, it’s about where we want to be.

• Customer Representative: What’s the problem to solve for customers and/or users?

• Experimenter: What is the smallest experiment we can run to validate that idea?

• Decision Maker: Look at the data and move forward.

• Collaborator: Let’s get stuff done, together.

• Influencer: How can I align people to do what is best for the product?

The purpose of this book was to inspire you with six preferred stances of a Product Owner to adapt ourselves to any given situation. As product people, we need to be versatile in our approach with customers, users, stakeholders, executives, and development teams as well as in our processes, tools, techniques, and communication. We need to master different stances to become a better product leader, and most of all, a better value maximizer.

Thank you.

Optimizing Transparency Using a Product Wall

Being a Product Owner is not about taking inputs from other people. You’re much, much more than a secretary of roadmaps and backlogs. You are the strategic brain behind the product, and it is your job to drive your product forward. The job entails making decisions that support the product and the broader, organization-wide objectives. It includes making decisions based on customer, market, industry, and product insights. It includes continuously communicating product vision and rethinking your strategy. It includes being transparent about what is and isn’t known.

Transparency is a powerful asset, which isn’t equal to visibility. Being transparent is about making information, processes, and decisions visible, open, accessible, understandable, inspectable, and therefore adaptable. Transparency is of critical importance in product management and product development. To build great products, information must be transparent to all people involved, such as key (launching) customers, stakeholders, and product developers. There are many ways to improve transparency, and one of them is to use a product wall. Many of the tools, techniques, and practices covered in this book (e.g., product vision, product goals, product roadmaps, and personas) make great additions to your product wall. We therefore encourage you to browse through this book again to identify which concepts might be good additions to your product wall.

A product wall, or obeya room,¹ is a helpful technique to foster transparency within the organization. It’s a practice where all product-related information is captured and made transparent in one place. It includes information such as market research, customer insights, technology trends, the product vision, product strategy, goals and objective key results, value measures, product metrics, personas, and much more. Anyone who wants to learn more about your product can go to the product wall to find out.

1. Obeya (from Japanese obeya, 大部屋, “large room”) originated at Toyota. Comparisons have been drawn between an obeya and the bridge of a ship, a war room, and even a brain.

Combining all product (management) information in one place (either in a physical office or on a virtual product wall) enables better decision making and allows you to collaborate with multiple parties more easily. Stakeholders will gather around the product wall to inspect the information and learn about the product’s health and progress, and help you to act. Data, analytics, insights, and evidence can be used to make better decisions, and to improve transparency and communication. There are many advantages to being transparent, and maintaining a transparent product wall. The key, though, is not to try to assemble a perfect product wall all at once. As we do in most of our work, take small steps. Start small. Claim a piece of office or virtual wall, post something there to inspect, and add more elements as you learn. Inspect. And adapt.

Epilogue

“What is that, Grandma?” The eyes of the little boy were as large as tea saucers as he stared at the large frame on the wall.

“That, young man, is a reprint of Relation Aller Fuernemmen und gedenckwuerdigen Historien,” was the reply. The boy looked at the elderly woman with bewilderment and utter confusion. “It is a replica of the first newspaper ever printed, well over 400 years ago,” Noa clarified. “It was given to me when I retired from World News. I’m quite fond of it.”

The young boy’s curiosity wasn’t yet satisfied. “So, what would people do with that?” he asked.

“Well, read it, of course,” Noa replied. “But fundamentally, they read it to expand their knowledge. By learning more about the world around them, they could make more informed decisions on how to lead their lives.”

“But why is it on paper, Grandma?” asked the still-curious boy.

Noa paused for a bit before answering, “In those days, there was no digital news. The world may seem different today, but the problems people faced were not so different.”

She pointed out some of the lettering on the ancient titles. “For people to do things that matter, they need to be informed. How we inform people may change over time, but the need for news and knowledge never does.”

That explanation seemed to be enough for the boy, as his eyes had traveled down to the small plaque attached to the bottom of the frame. “It says here you were the CEO of World News, Grandma. Has that always been your job?”

Noa smiled as she looked at him and said, “I’ve certainly always tried to act that way.”