I am not a Product Manager…but I talk to them. Episode 7: Sergio Morales (Qustodio)
I’m a Product Manager with over 15 years’ experience finding solutions for a wide variety of user problems.
I truly enjoy getting involved and making things happen by providing teams with a clear vision and helping them to achieve their goals. I’m constantly monitoring metrics and performing qualitative & quantitative user research to bring to light new opportunities for improvement and ultimately better our users’ lives.
I share my experience — and get lots of insights! — by teaching software & service engineering subjects at the Technical University of Catalonia and the Open University of Catalonia, and also by participating in meetups and conferences.
1) If you were a product, what product would you be? Why?
I guess I would be some kind of social network which aims to nurture a knowledge sharing relationship between all its members, and encourage them to improve their skills and collaborate with each other in order to better themselves. Because that’s what I’d like to become, across the whole company / university, including not only the teams I’m responsible for, but also my peers.
2) In your own words, what is a Product Owner? And a Product Manager? Which one do you prefer to define your job?
A Product Owner is a visionary and servant leader, a representative of the customer voice, who maximises the value the teams deliver to the user of the product / service, who is guided by an evidence-based management culture and whose management soft skills are key.
IMHO, Product Owner and Product Manager are synonyms — Product Owner is a role that is described in the Scrum Guide but its skills, functions and responsibilities are those of a typical Product Manager. Nowhere in the Scrum Guide is said that a Product Owner’s functions are constrained to those of pure development and delivery, but stresses that how they achieve their goal may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals. For a Product Owner to maximise the value delivered to the user it is necessary for them to understand (1) that user’s problems, (2) the available solutions in the market, (3) how these solutions solve and with what grade the user’s problems; and, ultimately, (4) define and prioritise the solutions proposed for delivering the new value. Without (1), (2) and (3), how could a Product Owner be able to prioritise their work?
When I see that a company is looking for a Product Owner but explicitly stating NOT a Product Manager, I bet that that company is actually looking for a person to just write user stories and prioritise the backlog based on other biz people’s decisions / opinions, without really understanding the vision of the product itself.
Susana Videira explains this issue better here.
3) Why do companies need Product Managers/Product Owners?
The Product Owner is the ultimate customer representative. Their main goal is to reduce waste during development and to maximise the value delivered to the customer. If a company doesn’t have a Product Owner, all those responsibilities are cluttered and distributed among a bunch of people with different objectives and points of view, maybe not skilled enough to understand the users’ needs and guided by their own opinion. As Harry Callahan once said: “Well, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one”
A Product Owner is not biased by their opinion. Their convictions are strong, until proven wrong.
4) What is the difference between a good Product Owner and a bad Product Owner?
Let’s say that there are no “good” and “bad” Product Owners but POs more comfortable in a specific maturity stage. Some POs are ok working as scribes — writing user stories dictated by business and acting as business analysts. Some others are extremely technical and they pursue a perfect delivery process, forgetting about other (previous precious) steps such as product discovery. The ideal Product Owner is one who has a perfect understanding of the user, their needs and the market opportunities and trends, and is able to use a variety of techniques and methods available in their bat-belt in order to provide a clear vision and define the roadmap to achieve it.
5) What do you enjoy the most as a Product Owner?
The joy of a team when they work together and achieve their goal.
6) What is the worst part of being a product owner? What frustrates you?
a) Zebras. There are lots of stakeholders in possession of the one and only truth; for me it’s hard to deal with those who also have a strong and immovable position, and don’t want to have an open conversation with actual data on the table. They are the Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant ones.
b) Technical debt. As a Product Owner I want to deliver and learn fast, but if the platform is tied by its technical debt then the speed and quality of development resents and I may eventually fail in my mission.
7) If you could ask any question to any product owner on Earth, who would you choose and what would you ask him/her?
“Why don’t we work together?” That applies to absolutely any Product Owner. I’m sure we would learn a lot from each other.
Note: this post is the seventh of an ephemeral set of articles based on my conversations with eight Product Managers. I will publishing the last article tomorrow. You can read Episode 6— interview with Mercè Garcia from Adevinta- through this link.