How to form a strong partnership with other product roles (Part 2/2)
Opening words
This is the second part of the topic on forming a strong partnership among different product roles. If you haven’t read the part 1/1, I strongly recommend to read it first -The Part 1/2 focuses on the Why — is important to build a partnership among different product roles.
In Part 2/2 will one focuses on the How — to do so as a business analyst.
As we all know, if we truly want to retain any information or knowledge, we need to start with why (Thanks Simon Sinek:).
Ok, let’s jump in
First of all, let’s clear an elephant in a room — Not every organisation have these 3 roles (Business Analyst, Product Owner and Product Manager).
That means you are likely to be one of the following situations:
- Your organisation has all 3 roles( BA, PO, PM)
- Your organisation only has 2 roles (PM & PO, PM & BA, PO &BA)
- Your are the Product!
As a Business analyst in different situations, you need to adopt a different approach to strategically form a strong partnership and accelerate your career.
Scenario 1: Your organisation has all 3 roles (BA, PO, PM)
These some my assumed characteristics of these organisation (base on experience) :
- Relative large organisation, potentially adopting some scaling framework, such as: SAFe
- There is a split between Business and IT
- BA is under IT and part of the delivery team
- Likely to be a “feature factory” (vs empowered team)* (Reference from Marty Cagan’s feature team vs Product team here & Book Empowered)
- There have been some “heads and hands” seperation situation (Reference from Esther Derby’s 2015 Agile Aus’s talk and previous blog)
If you are a business analyst in this organisation, if purely base on the job description, you are likely to operate in technology (feasibility) and Execution (delivery) domain and you are a critical part of the delivery team.
In order to form a strong partnership and out perform in this environment, here are the recommended approaches:
- Be an SME in Systems, Process and Tech
- Delivery Expert (Proxy SM/DL)
- Build strong relationship with Business stakeholders
- Remain a big picture view (don’t lose in details)
- Have regular professional development conversation with your manager
Be an SME in Systems, Process and Tech
The other product roles (PM and PO) and the rest of the organisation can really rely your domain expertise on the systems, process or tech platform you have extensive knowledge on when making critical product decisions. These knowledge will not only make you a valuable team member for the delivery team, but also become your superpower for building any long lasting and strong partnership with other product roles and the rest of the organisation.
Delivery Expert
From my experience, when you are business analyst in this scenario, you are also expected to be a delivery expert. That doesn’t mean you will be hold accountable for the result of the delivery, but you will be likely asked about providing delivery information and supporting team to achieving delivery goal. It would be really helpful if you have a good knowledge on key delivery metricsL lead time, cycle time, velocity etc.
If there is a scrum master or delivery lead in the team, it’s highly recommend to build a strong partnership with them and support them by helping the team work in a more effective way.
Build strong relationship with Business stakeholders
This is a really busy role, one of the common mistake a business analyst make under this situation(and I certainly had made that) is: leave all the stakeholder management work to the other product roles (product manager and product owner).
This is could really hold you back because:
- This may hinder your ability to get your task done in smooth way if there is a dependency with other product roles to handle some key communications.
- This may also prevent you to become an SME in the areas you want to. As we all know, most of the organisational knowledge is not in the documentation but within someone’s heads.
- Your hard work and contribution may never not be visible outside from your team and this may be hinder your career progression and opportunity to access new knowledge
Therefore, it’s strongly recommend you to build your own trusting and deep relationship with key business stakeholders, such as: Finance, Compliance, Sales etc.
Remain a big picture view (don’t lose in details)
This is likely to be a delivery focus role, so it’s very easy to fill your calendar with 100% of delivery details (Front-line knowledge /Execution Capabilities— bottom part of the diamond) and forget about the big picture of the product. (See Part 1/2 for detailed explanation).
In order to be an effective product people and working better with the other product roles, Your help will be truly appreciated and valued when you stay on the top of the big picture of the product. They will help you make more balanced and strategic product decisions and bridge the knowledge gaps across the organisations.
Have regular professional development conversation with your manager
This is the final recommendation for this scenario (and also applicable to other scenario too). You knowledge and expertise generated through this role will allow you to develop to any direction you want on this career map (from IIBA site). It’s really important for you to clearly identify where your skillset, passions and experiences are, and what area you want to move in. It’s always a good idea to have regular conversation with your direct manager/ mentor to discuss on your professional development plan and work toward it.
Scenario 2: Your organisation only have 2 roles
This is the most common scenario I experienced and I definitely see this as a trend in medium size businesses, especially for organisations that had gone through a recent “agile/digital transformation”.
- BA is a proxy Product Owner or actual Product Owner
- Product Manager could be under IT or Business
- PM and BA need to operate as 1 team
- Sometime, BA may be report to PM
If you are the business analyst in this situation, compare to the previous scenario, your role is more front and centre in the Product Big Picture map below.
Here are my recommendation for forming a strong partnership with other product roles:
- Be the Product Owner or Proxy Product Owner
- Be an SME in Customers, Stakeholders and Tech
- Delivery Expert and Gatekeeper
- Say no and manage expectation carefully
- Seamless partnership with PM and BA/PO
- Spend > 40% time contribute to product management activities, e.g: Market analysis, Competitor analysis, customer interviews etc
Be the Product Owner or Proxy Product Owner
If you are a business analyst in this environment, you are likely to be the proxy Product Owner or actual Product Owner in this situation.
That means you are expected to perform all the Product Owner’s responsibilities and activities, that including: developing and communicating product goals, manage backlog, be the voice of customer etc (see the reference of PO roles of PO here)
If you haven’t done this role before, it’s recommended to do relevant training and seek mentorship/coaching opportunity.
Be an SME of Customers, Stakeholders and Tech
On the top of being a SME for the Technology, Systems and Process, the business analyst in this scenario also requires to be a SME/Voice of the customers. You will be responsible to getting these insights from customers, stakeholders to help you make better prioritisation choices.
Delivery Expert and Gatekeeper
Similar to the previous scenario, you will be asked about the delivery status and responsible to make sure the team is working toward the product goals.
On the top of that, you are also likely to be the single point of entry for all the requests for delivery team — i.e: you are the gatekeeper for the work come to your team. As a gatekeeper- you need to be across every single work you team is working on and reprioritise or stop any work that are not align with the product goals.
Say no and manage expectation carefully
To continue the previous point, it’s not easy to be a good gatekeeper. I believe the key quality of a good gatekeeper is the ability to make effective prioritisation decisions on the product. That means — SAY NO to requests that you don’t believe will maximise the product value.
Be able to making this decisions timely with the information and knowledge on hand, manage stakeholders’ expectation effectively and smoothly is certainly not easy. However, this is one of the most important skills to be developed and exceeded as a proxy/Product Owner.
Seamless partnership with PM and BA/PO
In this scenario, you and Product Manager need to have high bandwidth collaboration and communication to make sure you two are align with the directions you are leading the team toward. It could really confused your team or stakeholders and reduce productivity if you two have different strategic directions for the product.
Spend > 40% time contribute to product management activities
This role also has a heavy delivery lens. However, to make sure not losing the big picture view of the product and also forming an aligned strategy with the Product Manager, I would recommend anyone in this role to spend > 40% time contribute to product management activities, e.g: Market analysis, Competitor analysis, customer interviews etc. This will also help you to develop practical Product management skills for future career progression as a PM.
Scenario 3: The organisation only have 1 role
It’s uncommon to realise you are the only product person in your organisation…There are 2 common scenarios in this situation:
- You are actually in Scenario 1 or 2, they just come in different names for example: you have something call Business Owner/ Tribe Lead/ GM etc. Or you CEO/Co-founder might have been filled in the product leader role. (most likely)
- You are “the Product” and need to do fulfil the roles for all 3 (especially in Startup)
If you are actually in Scenario 1 or 2
Even you may think you are the only product in this organisation, the truth is you are not… Your founder, CEO or other role in the senior leadership team is likely playing a product leader role without you realise it. So seek them out and form a strong partnership with them.
I would advice you to identify the actual dynamic and understand how your role fit in the structure. After you find this out, make sure to make this explicit and manage expectation with your manager and stakeholders.
You can refer to previous advices from here.
If you are the only Product in your organisation and need to do fulfil the roles for all 3. This is quite common in Small Organisation.
Here are some advices base on my personal journey so far:
- Priortise, Priortise, Prioritise !
- You need to have the product big picture view on all the time
- Empower and delegate
- Communicate your vision, strategy clearly and consistently
- Ask for supports and prevent burnout
This is actually out of the scope of the topic of forming partnership, so I won’t go to detail for each of them. The prioritisation, delegation and expectation management are crucial skills for this role to anyone to success and sustain on this role.
The End
Thanks for reading part 2/2 of this blog. All the opinions are based on my personal experiences and observations, please take them base on your personal and organisational situation.
If you have a different view or experience, you are welcome to email me or connect me on Linkedin to continue the discussion.
And the full slides of my presentation can be found here.
Questions from the audiences:
Q: What do you think of as the biggest challenge for BA acting as (Proxy) PO?
A: The biggest challenge is the BA is not setting up for success when acting as proxy PO. The main reasons in my experiences are:
- Lack of support for BA transit to become a PO (Close skillgap)
- There is no true empowerment as a “Proxy PO”.
In a lot of situations, Business Analysts become a proxy PO without sufficient transition support. The Proxy PO find it extremely challenge to handle additional accountability and perform some and push back Echoing Marty Cagan’s points in his recent blog — a 2 days’ PO training is not be sufficient to instantly turn someone to be a competent Product Manager/Owner.
The other common challenge the business analyst faces when acting as a proxy product owner is they are not empowered to make important decisions or get access to the information needed as a real Product Owner. This can be due to the complexity of the current organisation design or the management is not fully understand the product owner’s role.
Q: Have you ever experienced difficulties/challenges when you have different people doing all the 3 roles, as they overlap a lot? How to handle such a situation if all 3 roles are overwhelmed with workload?
A: We need more information to understand why each role is overwhelmed with workload and if this is part of the work culture in this organisations (i.e: is everyone else in this organisation also overwhelmed).
If this is part of the organisational culture, then it requires culture change. This will be out of the scope for this question. If it’s only the Product function is overwhelmed. Then we will need to consider the following questions:
- What are the top priorities for this team/organisation? Do we have too many priorities? Can we depriorise anything ??
- Is there any conflicting priority among the 3 roles that causes confusion and constant context switching?
- Are there any bottlenecks or waste in the current process?(e.g: dependency with other departments, duplication of work, ineffective documentations or process)
I would recommend these 3 roles to get together to help diagnose the root cause for their overwhelm by sharing their perspective with the above 3 questions. And collectively come up with ideas to resolve this.
Q: What are your thoughts on a developer/technical person stepping into at Product Owner role?
A: I think this is a good idea :) I believe in skillsets, passions and willingness to learn more than Job Title or previous experiences. I have seen a lot of successful cases (and also not that success cases) for technical person transit to a PO. There are some obvious advantages and disadvantages for a passionate technical person to move into a Product Owner role.
For example: a technical PO will have a deeper empathy and understanding when communicating with our technical team and will be able to consider some edge cases that might be missed by non technical PO. In the meantime, this person will need to let go of their excessive focus on the technical aspects and have a more balanced view when making decisions ( refer to the 2 product lenses above).
I found some stories from some product owners successfully transit from a developer here:
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-journey-from-developer-to-product-owner-a055c28779ec
https://medium.com/outsystems-engineering/from-developer-to-product-owner-9f97245e4a7f
