How to be the greatest product owner in the world ?

Disclaimer : This post doesn’t represent THE way of thinking product owner at CANAL+ but only one of the many ways (mine 😉). Also, I’m NOT the greatest product owner so this post only represents what I think he might be.

When I talk about my job at events or meetup, I often receive astonished comments about my technical skills. It seems like for most of the tech industry, a product owner is simply someone with UX/UI skills who know Agile methods. I don’t understand why, because as a product owner, having technical skills feels natural to me.

Let’s do a small imagination exercise…

You are Christopher Nolan, the director/producer who made Interstellar, Inception and the three best Batman movies. Your job is to provide the best media experience possible for your (future) clients.

Your crew is composed of numerous roles on which you’ll have to rely : writers, actors, director of photography, set decorator, sound engineer, visual effects technician… and the list goes on.

source https://unsplash.com/@seemurray

The media experience works as a whole. Each part is as important as the other. You can have the best story ever but bad actors will ruin your movie. Same goes for the sound, visual effects, set decoration, costumes,…

Each person in your team could be a first class worker in their domain, your movie and your story differs from an other. That’s why you will need to share with them your in depth vision for your movie. What should be the dialog’s tone, what should be the rhythm of the story, what should be the light and ambiance, … and so on for every operational job.

Later on, you need to control and adjust what has been done and maybe rework some parts.

How can you check and adjust what you don’t deeply understand ?

Of course you can ask experts and plan a meeting to check if your idea is relevant and achievable within the time and budget. But at some point, it would be very inefficient with the billion details you have to handle on a day-to-day basis.

For example if you notice an issue during a take. How can you decide if the camerawork is good if you don’t know what is possible to do with visual effects or what would be the cost of doing it with a computer versus redoing the take.

For all the above, a digital product is the very same !

And when I talk about digital products, I’m not just talking about front-end. Designing an API, a backend, an infrastructure or a network needs the same global vision. You always have a client whether he is internal or external to your company.

So…

You are the Christopher Nolan of your product in the awesome quest to find the best customer experience.

The means don’t matter, only the result. But you HAVE to keep in mind the long run, not the short one. This is important because unlike Nolan’s, your product will hopefully live a couple of years and killing your crew to the task or writing quick&dirty code will not help you advance towards new features.

So what’s the deal with a product owner that really understands how his project interacts with all the underlying fields ?

It’s all about prioritization, efficiency, improvements and challenging your team.

Since a product owner owns his product, what does he really own ?

• The product’s future through his vision ! … also materialized with the backlog
• UI/UX
• Code base and software architecture
• Business done with the product
• Infrastructure
• User’s data and analytic

Of course, he does not really own everything since he usually relies on experts for each domain…

…but at some point, the product owner will have to decide what is good for the product in every aspects.

Moreover, everything is mixed up and tied together… let’s take some examples !

Performance is a business feature

There are plenty resources on the web, just keep those examples in mind :

• Amazon has calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year (data from 2012)
• Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just 400ms they could lose 8 million searches per day — meaning they’d serve up many millions fewer online adverts.

So as a product owner, choose carefully what you want to prioritize : feature or performance enhancement. If you listen the business owner, it will always be the former but the latter might in fact need more attention and efficient in a business perspective.

Refactoring is both business and team motivation

On mycanal.fr we have a 80% ratio of technical story and refactoring versus enhancements or features. It might seems a lot but the truth is that it enables the rest of the team to have a high velocity on those remaining 20%.

The situation no one wants on his project (credit unknown sorry)

When you have this kind of ratio, you can be rock solid on your unit & functionals tests, on your stack, your architecture,… technical debt is always REALLY heavy to carry, you want to keep it small whatever the circumstances are. You will encounter much less issues and your team won’t tell you they have to rebuild everything from the ground up one year later. So it’s good for your team’s motivation and good for business.

Let’s sum up

In my opinion, the best product owner in the world…

• Knows his clients and how they use the product (through data, focus group, survey, meeting… or whatever is available)
• Fully embraces the underlining technologies and the product’s ecosystem (web & browsers for a website for example)
• Knows his company’s business and strategy
• Knows how his product is built and how it runs (architecture and infrastructure)
• Is a visionary and a true team leader
• Shares his vision
• Has some knowledge and understanding in every jobs that are required to make his product…
• … but he lets experts do their job (just challenge and vision without control)
• and maybe loves his product… because the best stuff always comes from love, isn’t it ? ;)

So I would say it’s pretty hard because of the wide range of skills required.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with users stories the backlog is, I am the master of my product’s fate: I am the captain of its soul.

Quote from Morgan-Freeman-the-product-owner ;)

What do you think ? Did I miss something ? Do you know someone that fits the role perfectly ?

Sam