If You Don’t Say No Many Times a Day. You Fail as a Product Owner
Until you learn how to say no at least 10x a day, you will achieve mediocre results.
I wonder why many Product Owners think we need to please the stakeholders. We don’t have to be a people pleaser. We are the value maximizers. Our mission is to ensure we lead the team to deliver the highest value possible for the product. Why’s that so complicated?
The Product Owner role is challenging; it requires to be courageous. Every day people will come with multiple requests, which they argue to be urgent. So, they expect you to help them with that. You can please your stakeholders. In the short-term, they will be happy. But by doing that, are you maximizing the value? Probably not. At best, you are maximizing stakeholders’ short-term satisfaction.
Successful Product Owners do not care about the short-term perspective! Instead, our mission is to build meaningful products to fulfill the customer’s needs.
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
