Leo Tolstoy on Agile Product Owners

by Kinda Youssef Allamaa

To only slightly misquote the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:
“All happy Product Owners are alike, but each unhappy Product Owner is unhappy in their own way.”

In my ten years as a Digital Delivery Manager, I have learned that the key to success is a happy Product Owner. I do everything I can to ensure my Product Owners are happy. However, I have noticed, as I am sure Tolstoy would have put it if he had been a project manager, that the Product Owners who come out of the whole product development process happy tend to approach projects in the same general way.

So in the interests of ensuring all your current and future Product Owners are happy Product Owners, I am sharing with you my list of best practice “do”s and “don’t”s.

DOs:

  • Do be clear about what you want (new features, changed Requests, etc). Talk about what the new feature or function should do, not how you want it done. Respect your project team’s expertise to know the “how”!
  • Do plan, prepare and prioritize as many stories as is necessary to keep the team busy throughout the sprint.
  • Do be available to the team. They will need your input regularly.
  • Do get actively involved in the shaping of your user stories and acceptance criteria because these are at the heart of how the product looks and works.
  • Do manage stakeholder expectations on an ongoing basis.* Do participate in Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Review and Retrospective meetings.
  • Do break down user stories into easily, manageable and achievable chunks. In Agile, less is definitely more.
  • Do say “NO” appropriately when necessary to maximize the value of your product.

DON’Ts:

  • Don't introduce changes in the middle of a sprint. You wouldn’t change horses in the middle of a race!
  • Don't focus only on the short-term. The big picture matters too.
  • Don’t try to run before you can walk. Focus on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before adding bells and whistles.
  • Don’t make your project team guess the subject of your user stories. Add enough detail so your team gets context and meaning.
  • Don’t just use two priorities: “Urgent“ and “super urgent“. When everything is important, then nothing is.
  • Don’t promise release dates and scope to your main stakeholder without talking to your project team first.
  • Don’t insist on long sprints of at least four weeks. After all, it’s a sprint, not a marathon!
  • Don’t miss the daily stand-ups meetings then talk to individual developers or team members instead. Keep the whole project team in the loop!

This is, of course a brief list. I will try over the next few weeks to expand on some of the points above. Please leave comments below if you have any questions or if you want to share your experiences in product management, lessons learned or for that matter quotes from Tolstoy you particularly like.