Advice to Product Owners from a Developer
Some Do’s and Don’ts for Product Owners from your team
“I think we need to look at cleaning up the repository layer,” said one of our data guys to the team. “It’s way too chatty, and it doesn’t log well.” Collective nods from the engineers and devs.
The testers begin to ask what kind of regression this will take, when the product owner interrupts. We’ll call her Katy.
“Wait,” Katy says. “We can’t refactor that. I’ve looked at it; that seems fine.” Katy was a developer five years ago, and feels she’s technical enough to make that kind of decision.
“Let’s put it on the backlog,” Craig, one of the engineers, says.
“We’ll look at that another time,” Katy says. “We’ll talk about that when we get through our other work.”
“I have free time,” Miguel says. “I could look at spiking that out.”
“No,” Katy says. “I told the business we’d be done with these other five stories by end of the sprint.”
“But those are stretch goals,” I say. “We never agreed to finish anything except what’s already been done.”
“We’re doing this,” Katy says, with a tone of finality. “We need to keep moving.”
For the fifth time this week, several of us bite our tongues. Katy carries on with the stand-up, telling us we have a deadline she’s promised to the sales team which takes precedence. We need to be ready a week early.
What is a Product Owner?
What are the responsibilities of a Product Owner? Let me quote Jack Milunsky from his blog post on DZone. Your role is to:
- Create and MAINTAIN the Product Backlog
- Prioritize and sequence the Backlog according to business value or ROI
- Assist with the elaboration of Epics, Themes and Features into user stories that are granular enough to be achieved in a single sprint
- Convey the Vision and Goals at the beginning of every Release and Sprint
- Represent the customer, interface and engage the customer
