A Product Owner’s Syllabus
In one of my previous articles I’ve written on why it might be preferable to nurture product owners (or, project managers, or *insert here* ) internally, rather than hire newcomers. Based on how I’ve seen this approach at work, it delivers. It’s just safer and more reasonable to have several competent people involved in the product-related decision-making, rather than hold only one person accountable for everything. In an ideal world, all the folks who work at any given company — QA’s, developers, designers, marketing, support, etc. — would have been engaged in educational activities one way or another. And, these activities would have been intertwined with the work, always. Home-made product owners would have been educated with the work, too, and today I’d like to share a syllabus, of sorts, that I’ve compiled for them. This syllabus has emerged from out-of-the-trenches needs; it represents a composite of skills and knowledge actually required to manage a software product (or an app).
By no means am I putting a “certified *label* product owner” training course tag on that syllabus. What I’m looking for is to provide some “homeschooling” for novice product owners. Quite often formal training courses are too short (2–3 days), they cost money and fail to give a universal knowledge that a product owner needs (poke me if that’s not true). A formal course might be limited to a single “brand” or “label” from a certain domain, while the needs of practical software development require an out-of-the-box, labelless thinking. That being said, a product owner will still want to be familiar with the major trends in the agile domain, and to switch between the brands and labels easily, depending on where their product is headed next.
Here’s a tentative summary of this homeschooling Product Owner’s Syllabus. The mind map only gives a descriptive outline of the syllabus, as an intro, and this is just a draft outline, a think pad, of sorts. I don’t claim this sketch to be an exhaustive summary of all the knowledge because… it all depends.
Product owners can be educated in the 4 main areas: Agile Domain, Marketing, Product Development, and Backlog Management. And, the product/-s that the company makes/develops/supports/ extends would be the practice material for these studies.
Let me re-iterate, that first and foremost a product owner would be someone with a curious mind. The way that I’d orient them would be this: be free from prescriptions. The main disadvantage of taking a training course that bears some “label” would often mean that students are pushed to operate within the limits of this label, ignoring the fact that there are other practices available which might work better in this particular case. As an example, if there’s a course that trains product owners in Scrum only, it would be a limiting thing, because the work might demand switching to Kanban, or even to waterfall which might happen to be clad in the toga of SAFe, etc. This freedom from frameworks and labels would be one of the key prerequisites of a product owner’s success. Practices are only practices. The first question that a product owner should ask when introduced to a technique or a practice is this one: “What problem does this practice solve?”, rather than: “How do we tweak our product development to fit it to this practice?”
Another meta-skill applicable to all the areas would be the ability to measure, analyze, and make decisions (including, but not limited to, the ones that are based on data.) We might want to measure feedback, customer satisfaction, or even assign some numerical value to the product features, etc.
And, the third-layer of skills would be… you guessed it right, the people skills. Product-related decisions, in most companies, are usually done by a group of sorts, and require leveraging input from many for a buy-in.
That’s how it looks, for starters. I hope to write more on the subjects outlined here in my future articles.
Related:
One Product Owner Is Not Enough
Product Backlog: Steps vs. Leaps
Project Managers: Nurturing vs. Hiring
Product Development: Drive or Hitchhike?
Further reading:
This article is based on an earlier story.
