Characteristics of a Good Product Owner

As coaches, we are prepared to work at all levels of an organisation, including with Product Managers and Product Owners. Unsurprisingly, these roles are key to the success of a company in the modern landscape and in this short blog post I would like to share what I think are 5 key characteristics of effective Product Owners.

If you like these, you could also use them to measure how effective your Product Owners are and how to hire your next one.

Desire

The first characteristic is Desire. As obvious as it sounds, I have experienced working in organisations where the newly-created Product Owner role was given to colleagues who did not have the experience or the desire to be Product Owners.

Perhaps the role had been created to comply with the new roles dictated by the “agile transformation” but in reality was being assigned to junior members of staff because “everyone else was too busy”.

Effective Product Owners must be motivated to work in that space and experienced enough to lead. In fact, effective Product Owners are great servant leaders.

If you’re in charge of the org design at your workplace, ensure that product ownership as a capability is developed around motivated individuals who are going to be supported in their journey by the rest of the organisation. Product Owner is an exciting but demanding role. And getting it wrong undermines your ability to deliver value.

Authority

The second characteristic is Authority. Product ownership is not a proxy role. To be effective, Product Owners must have the authority to make decisions and say ‘no’. A proxy Product Owner will ultimately depend on the real Product Owner for decision-making and concentrate on the tactical aspects of the role (for example managing the backlog, tracking progress) without the necessary exposure to market segmentation, end user research and portfolio management.

Many large organisation (who perhaps haven’t optimised their structure yet) find it necessary to split product management into two roles: a strategic role, the Business Product Owner (focused on the customer and the market) and a tactical role, the proxy Product Owner. My advice is that you don’t do this and instead keep the Product Owner role as one individual: an entrepreneurial Product Owner focused on customer value.

This can be a difficult job, especially for a Product Owner you have just hired. But with the right support from the delivery teams, from the wider organisation and from the Coaches, this way of positioning the role has a higher probability to guide you effectively towards value creation.

Accountability

The third characteristic is Accountability.

I’d like to refer to the Scrum guide to discuss what this means for the Product Owner role. Here’s what the guide says;

The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes:

· Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal;

· Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items;

· Ordering Product Backlog items; and,

· Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible, and understood.

The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.

Of course, you don’t have to adopt Scrum to have a Product Owner. However, this is still a good guideline on what it means to be an effective Product Owner. The tangible evidence of the prioritisation and the clarity provided by an effective Product Owner is visible in a well-managed product backlog.

Knowledge

The fourth characteristic is knowledge. The Product Owner is accountable for maximising the value of the product, defining the vision and being the voice of the customer.

To do this effectively, Product Owners need to understand the product, the customer and the market in which they operate. They need to have the drive to constantly learn and try new things.

Availability

The last characteristic is Availability. It might sound obvious but an effective Product Owner must have enough time to perform the role to the best of her ability.

One way in which you can undermine this is by assigning the role of the Product Owner to someone as her “second role”, i.e. they have a core job and are asked to act as a Product Ownership when they have time. This scenario is similar to making a Developer on the team the part-time Scrum Master for that team.

Another example of an unavailable Product Owner is a Product Owner who spends all of her time on stakeholder management and not enough time with delivery teams, or vice versa. The unavailable Product Owner will ultimately not have enough time to provide what is asked from her: prioritisation and clarity, and that will impact your delivery teams (to begin with) who will not be able to get enough value for the business from their work.

Product Owner is obviously a full-time job and organisations who are serious about developing their product capability will know this very well. It goes without saying that someone who is stretched between multiple jobs or doesn’t have enough time to perform this role cannot have their finger on the pulse of the market and the competition.

Conclusion

As a coach, you will come across organisations where the role of the Product Owner has not been set-up properly and therefore does not have all the characteristics we discussed in this article. If that is the case, you will want to have a coaching conversation with the organisation (one or more members of the senior leadership team) about how the role has been positioned and how this impacts their success as a company.

In my experience working with agile teams, I have learned that Product Owners can make or break an agile team, therefore it’s important to strive for these 5 characteristics and use them to help organisations grow their product development capability over time.

What do you think? What is your experience? We’d love to hear from you.

For more articles like this explore medium.com/beyond-value.