What is a Product Owner?
Posted by: kelly in Business and Strategy on April 3rd, 2010
In the Agile Software Methodology there is a role called the Product Owner. This is a new version of the traditional Product Manager.
My interest in team roles began after reading “I Sing the Body Electric: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier” by Fred Moody. Moody spent a year with a team at Microsoft observing them building a children’s encyclopedia product code-named Sendak (Encarta Junior). The team was a mess and the project was a stress filled 2 years of seemingly bad decisions and unhappiness. I won’t ruin the ending but highly recommend this read. This book highlights the Product Manager role and how they work with the team.
As I pondered the Product Owner role during my run this morning I came up with these flavors of the same thing:
Army of One
This is the person that calls themselves a Product Owner but is basically told what features to build, writes the code and is responsible for testing everything with no help. This is typically seen when organizations “adopt Agile” but are still small without the cash to hire multiple developers and testers that round out the team.
Dev Team Project Manager
This is the person who works on a proper Scrum team, works with Stakeholders to define priority and is doing many things right to produce results. They are really a Project Manager that is lucky to have a killer team, especially ones that have Designers on the team to elaborate the User Stories. The team is humming along well under this person’s direction but they can probably be replaced without too much impact. Companies usually pair this person with a Business Analyst or Product Marketing person.
The true Product Owner
This person possesses a deep technical knowledge of the Products they are working on, has a strategic mind with an understanding of their marketplace and can talk to Customers. They are focused on one product or product family, come up with their own ideas as well as translate input from Stakeholders and are a thought leader in the space.
I was very inspired by this WWDC video featuring Werner Jainek of Cultured Code. He speaks as a true Product Owner. Listen to how he easily explains why Things for the iPhone is important by saying “tasks hit you while you’re walking in the city or in the store buying something”. Then he discusses the iPhone SDK and it’s importance to the success of Things, and concludes with analysis of the marketplace for ToDo List software and the impact of the iTunes store as well as the price point they selected for the app.
Of course, each organization is in different phases of their life and has resource constraints, not everyone is the same. What type of Product Owner are you?
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Read Part 2, What does a Product Owner do?
Read articles I’ve tagged about Product Owner and Product Management
What Powder Days say about your Professional and Personal life
Any dude that’s a real skier will talk about powder days as their best days ever after major life events like their wedding, birth of their children and graduations.
As a Skier myself, I have faced many situations caused by powder days, some extremely satisfying and some that test the core parts of my life such as my marriage and my job. I recall vividly an incredible Thursday powder day at Vail a few years ago with my brother, as we rolled into the Village I turned on my phone to see 10 voicemails, our servers were down and I was no where to be found, uh oh.
Over the years powder days have been harder and harder to swing. My heart is in it, but my schedule says that meeting is too important to miss or that look in my wife’s eye tells me it’s time for me to watch the baby while she sleeps in.
All of this got me thinking about powder days as a gauge to the control you have over your life and business. If I called you right now and said “Dude, A-Basin is getting dumped on, let’s hit it tomorrow!” Could you?
I think getting to the point in your life where you have this freedom is an amazing goal. You used to have it, but now responsibility has crept up on you. Work-Life Balance is all about being an incredibly responsible, hard working, successfully, total Bad-Ass that can sneak away and grab a powder day.
Here are 3 suggestions for helping you ditch work and ski pow:
1. Have you put process in place to help you manage fires in your daily life? Hopefully Yes, you need to be in a situation where the big decisions that cause tons of stress are made thoughtfully and slowly. Don’t be the guy that has to react to every single thing throughout the day. There is always a punching bag like this in every company, no matter how big or small, you need to work hard to not be that guy.
2. Does your company culture thrive on who is in the office when? I just heard Jason Fried of 37 Signals talk about this in a recent podcast about Remake, “Every office has the asshole that waits until everyone leaves then leaves 5 minutes later.” Work very hard and never let face time bother you, it has no value to your career and you just have to let it go.
3. Talk to your Boss with total transparency about this. “You know I love to ski, and this winter I would like to take a few days off, only when it is dumping snow in the mountains, to ski for the day. I will never let this affect my work and have worked hard so that everyone has me covered. I will always email the night before to key team members and check my phone throughout the day.” I have learned in my professional and personal relationships that sometimes if you want something you just have to ask, and be ready to work hard for it. When your boss says “Thanks for being so transparent with me, I think that’s a great idea.” it also means “I am granting you this freedom and you have to work really hard and not screw up to keep it.” Asking your Boss to take powder days can only be asked once, no second chances.
I write this post mainly as a motivation to myself. I am just as guilty of being sucked into responsibility as the next guy.
Good Luck, and Bon Hiver.
Being more Productive
One of my hobbies is studying how to be more productive. I have read David Allen’s GTD books, listen to 43 Folders podcast, thirst after Inbox Zero and talk to people about how they manage their time.
Below are some things I’ve learned.
Plan your year in context
I learned this from Brad Feld who calls this “The Rhythms of his Life“. Think of your time in segments: Year, Quarter, Month, Week, Day. Create a routine for each of these segments that you follow such as taking a vacation each quarter, wake up at the same time each day, etc.
Understand how your spend your time each day
I am using a utility called RescueTime that runs in the background and analyzes the applications you have open. When you are away from your computer RescueTime asks you “What have you been doing?”. You can view reports of “Time Wasted” and “Producive Time”. I don’t run RescueTime everyday, just every once in a while to help me stay on track. It’s amazing how much time I waste everyday!
This is a graph showing my day today. I woke up at 5am for my Morning Think time but my daughter woke up as well so I spent my morning with her. As you can see I took a break around lunchtime and mid-day is when I am interrupted the most with random questions and water cooler conversation.
Trust your System
I learned this from David Allen’s GTD books. I use Things as my ToDo list. Anytime anyone says anything that I need to follow up on I dump it into my Inbox on Things. Each week I have my “Weekly Review” to organize this list. The amount of stuff that I procrastinate on or drop has been reduced dramatically by using Things.
The above shows the Inbox view in my Things app. Every task, usually life stuff but some work stuff, I dump into the Inbox for “processing” later.
Morning Think
I have written about my Morning Think Time on this blog previously. A few days a week I try and wakeup at 5am. For about 2 hours I sip coffee and do whatever I want, usually read or research on my laptop sitting in my robe. This time is extremely productive and helps me think about the big picture, read or just knock off small tasks.
What’s Next?
2009 has been a transformative year for me as I’ve become extremly productive following the above tactics. My goals in 2010 are to be more productive on the bigger things in my life now that I have the day to day figured out.
My Workspace at The Fuel Team in Denver
Recently we restructured our teams at The Fuel Team and I found myself not sitting with the Dev Team for the first time in my career. I was hesitant at first but the physical move has created a new headspace for me to operate in. Our Dev Team cranks hard, everyday. They work on big features, production work, design work, work within multiple languages and platforms and find time to have a ton of fun as well. Being separated from this has allowed me to slow down my pace, ween myself off the high that comes from cranking out work, and think hard about our products, product roadmap and software development approach. It’s funny how the grass is always greener. I always wished for more time to think about our products, now that I have it, I find myself longing to program….trying to learn Rails and Objective C in my spare time!
Running everyday in August
I was searching for a new fitness goal and decided to run, at least a mile or so, everyday in August. I completed my goal and encourage others to give it a try. Below is a list of Pros and Cons from my experience:
Pros:
- feeling healthy on a daily basis
- getting more fresh air than normal
- having something interesting to talk about
- lost 3 lbs
- bought new running shoes
- plowed through some of those podcasts I wished I had more time to listen to
Cons:
- legs, especially my knees, were sore a few days and I knew I should’ve rested but instead I ran
- my normal runs became shorter (averaging 2.5 miles), no long runs in August
This challenge was a great lesson in “glass 1/2 empty, glass 1/2 full” thinking. You have to approach everyday with the right attitude. Either it’s “This sucks, I am so busy and there is no way I can go for a run” or this “I’m sorry, I can’t meet you for drinks after work. I am trying to run everyday in August and have to get my run in, you understand right?”
I recommend this challenge for anyone, runner or non-runner. It’s a great way to turn just another normal month into something more.