In this episode, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the qualities to look for when recruiting and selecting the perfect Product Owner (PO). They delve into the nuances between a Product Owner and a Product Manager role, emphasizing the importance of defining the authority and accountability the PO will have. The conversation explores the essential attributes of an excellent PO, including domain knowledge, understanding business models, data-driven decision-making, effective communication skills, and the ability to navigate various stakeholder demands. They also highlight the significance of storytelling and sharing real-life experiences during the interview process as a strong indicator of a high-caliber PO.
This week´s takeaways:
Clearly outline the level of authority and accountability the PO will have over the product's success, profitability, and decision-making.
Look for candidates with relevant domain experience, an understanding of the business models, and the capability to analyze the product's impact on the organization's ecosystem, including costs, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
During the interview process, pay attention to candidates who naturally share stories and narratives about their experiences, challenges they overcame, and lessons learned. These stories often provide insights into their problem-solving abilities and deep understanding of product ownership.
We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic related to nurturing exceptional product ownership, feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.
In this episode, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the qualities to look for when recruiting and selecting the perfect Product Owner (PO). They delve into the nuances between a Product Owner and a Product Manager role, emphasizing the importance of defining the authority and accountability the PO will have. The conversation explores the essential attributes of an excellent PO, including domain knowledge, understanding business models, data-driven decision-making, effective communication skills, and the ability to navigate various stakeholder demands. They also highlight the significance of storytelling and sharing real-life experiences during the interview process as a strong indicator of a high-caliber PO.
This week´s takeaways:
Clearly outline the level of authority and accountability the PO will have over the product's success, profitability, and decision-making.
Look for candidates with relevant domain experience, an understanding of the business models, and the capability to analyze the product's impact on the organization's ecosystem, including costs, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
During the interview process, pay attention to candidates who naturally share stories and narratives about their experiences, challenges they overcame, and lessons learned. These stories often provide insights into their problem-solving abilities and deep understanding of product ownership.
We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic related to nurturing exceptional product ownership, feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.
Peter:
Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello Dave, how are you today?
Dave:
Excellent, I hear you've been away. You're back in the right time zone, back in your own bed, fully recovered.
Peter:
I hope. Yeah, well, my body is, whether my mind is that's coming along slowly. It'll arrive shortly. Delayed shipping.
Dave:
The next platform is the delayed train from yes, exactly, excellent, excellent.
Peter:
So I asked somebody I was working with today, an AVP at a company, hey, what might be a good topic for the podcast this evening? And he had one, which I thought was great because they just had some staffing changes and had somebody move. And one of his partners on the business side is really wanting to know how to answer this, which is how to recruit and select the perfect PO, and I thought, oh, dave is going to love this one, so let's have a look, isn't it?
Dave:
So this is good, it's really interesting. So one of the conferences I was at earlier this year, which is the Vancouver Product Camp, which is one of my favorite sort of community free events for product people, and there is so much anticipation about new product owners coming on board, like product owners or product managers, and what they can bring to the table and what they're going to be going and doing, and in so many cases they're not set up for success as they walk through the door and you can see this in the conversations and everything that goes with that. So brilliant question and my first sort of clarification of clarification, if you like is product owner versus product manager and really just can we group them together and say how do I bring an excellent product owner or product manager in for a product? Who is going to guide that product to a successful launch or continuing life cycle, whatever it might be?
Peter:
and there's a lot of conversation, of course, in the marketplace. How these terms are defined is sometimes dependent on organizations, and sometimes you find them almost entirely reversed, which not as often these days, I think. I think it's getting a little clearer, but how would you define the difference between a product manager and a product owner? It?
Dave:
sort of depends on the door that you walk through, right? So if I come from the business side and I have a product management group, then the product manager is on the business side. They're going, you know, P&L, responsible for strategy of the product and so on. That obviously, you know, cascades down requirements and expectations to a product team that's doing the work, whatever that might be If you come from the door of, you know, building up from a product owner attached to an agile team.
Dave:
they're again more focused on what the team is actually getting to do, on a sprint by sprint basis, let's say. But they still have responsibility for working to a plan, understanding a product vision and a roadmap and delivery strategy and things like that. So they kind of come in from different perspectives and, as you pointed out, every organization has its own interpretation, In kind of a traditional one, I'd say, product managers. Normally, as you grow you're going to have multiple product roles, all of them working under, say, a product manager typically. But if your organization isn't set up like that, it just means the names are subtly different. It doesn't really change the roles there.
Peter:
I sometimes use business owner in the product, but, yes, it's that kind of that space where the person's got more of an oversight of the products versus the sort of deeper understanding of like, how does this part of the product, the product, need to behave and how are we going to interact with people, which I actually think gets us onto if we're hiring the perfect PO right in the product owner role, what is it we should be looking for?
Dave:
Yeah, there's one other question I think we have to answer before understanding that you know product owner, product manager piece that we just did. And that one is what do you want them to do? What authority are you going to give that role as they come in? And this is, I think, one of the biggest challenges in organizations, because when we want a really good product owner, what we mean is we want somebody. I believe what we mean is somebody who can make that profit for the product, be exceptional and get the sort of lift in performance, in customer interactions, in bottom line results everything from a business perspective, really ownership and the authority to make the changes that they need. And the biggest reason that you don't see that is you've got a feature factory with a list of stuff that needs doing and you want a product owner to prepare those features, define them, so a team can deliver them. That isn't a recipe for success, for a product owner?
Peter:
No, no, and I've actually been reading a little bit about picked up an interesting book when I was in the UK called the Unaccountability Machine, which might be I might point it your way and we can have a talk about it on a future podcast but some of the conversation, one of the pieces that he talks about early on in that book, is the concept of an accountability sink and how we set up organizations to fail by putting in sets of rules which mean that people are no longer accountable for the pieces they do, and this is where you're talking about. You need accountability and authority, and so what are you willing to give that product owner?
Dave:
essentially, well, I mean it's um, I've had, I've mentored product managers and product owners where they wanted to be able to use data-driven decision making and what they and the organization made it very clear that's their intent, but what they were finding is every database decision was overruled by you know somebody in the room who had a title significantly higher than theirs, who was able to kind of force through various goals, desires, features, whatever it might be. And this is where it gets really difficult, because they now no longer have accountability for the results of the product. As a product owner, if I'm being overruled all the time, how on earth can I own the profitability of that product, the growth of that product?
Peter:
Yeah, and I mean, I mean this is a as a common problem in in systems as a whole. But again for for later point. Let's move on with the perfect product donor, before you fall down that rabbit hole of the counter.
Dave:
And and I think you know that that Final thing is, if I'm really looking for a product owner that's going to take on that product and make it successful, and we're prepared to give them authority and the resources that they need, that's the money they need, the influence they need to have to be able to be successful with that product. We've set it up for success. Now we're in a really good place to get some good conversations and there are some brilliant product people out there. I've been very fortunate to work with a handful of them over the years and there's some really good digital product managers, product owners who understand product very, very well, and they're one of the things is they're they're business leaders in their own right.
Dave:
So, in order to get an excellent product owner, I'm going to want to have somebody step in with experience, domain knowledge, some understanding of the type of business that we're in right, because there are many sort of gotchas in every type.
Dave:
You know every business, every sort of model that you may have, and you want somebody who's got some experience. They kind of know where to look and what to do. So, if you're in e-commerce and you want somebody who's got some experience, they kind of know where to look and what to do. So if you're in e-commerce, then you want somebody who comes from an e-commerce background somewhere in the past. If you're working in in insurance or financial services, you better have somebody who understands a little bit about risk and regulatory challenges that go alongside that that side, those sides of things. So I think domain knowledge becomes super important at some point. Now I don't think it has to be super deep necessarily. They may be kind of elevating from an operational role into less of a tactician and more of a strategic leader role, but they should know where to look and have some experience that they can point to in that domain.
Peter:
Yeah, and I think that then extends into the understanding of the business models that the organization is operating under and the ability to interpret and adjust how this particular organization is operating and being able to think about those models and so they can understand how best to influence it and improve and work out what directions to take the product in to support it. So this is that piece of understanding the modeling aspect of it. I think that's a key piece as well.
Dave:
I think you bring in a really important piece there as well.
Dave:
It's to do with that profit and loss piece, the P&L.
Dave:
When the best product owners understand the P&L of their product, product, their business, they now, if it's an internal, it's not measured in terms of profit and loss necessarily if it's an internal system or service that's being offered. But they understand, like, for example, the impact of a poor digital pathway has on a call center and the sort of non-digital routes in for customers or end users coming in and having to whatever do things through that that more costly route. So that understand I, I'm I'm kind of one of the the areas that I struggle with with a lot of product owners and product managers is they they look at their product and they worry about releases and they worry about talking to customers and getting things out, but they're not looking at the ecosystem. They're not looking at necessarily what impact if an imperfectly configured change goes out, does it suddenly drive your costs up in a call center or is it affecting your retention or your conversion rates and things like this? So there's a bunch of things comes in with that business model piece.
Peter:
And an interesting piece from that that I see in a lot of the work that I do is when looking at organizationally, how do you line this up with all of the different demands on technology, as we sort of think from a product owner perspective, I need to be aware of what else needs to happen in the ecosystem, of what else needs to happen in the ecosystem, because those demands are not just coming from inside of the, they're not just coming from your customers to the organization. You're also going to have demands from other parts of the organization and the best situated people to deal with are the same people who have to deal with those incoming business demands, because they're the ones who understand the systems. And you've got this crux point with different demands coming from different people with different agendas and different goals, and there is no win-win for all of this.
Dave:
No, it's always collaborative, right, so I love the way that you're describing it.
Dave:
So we have and we can share this out we have an artifact called what we call a product and a knowledge wheel where they have to know a little bit about a lot of different things.
Dave:
They don't need to be experts in them, but they have to understand. Just as an example, they have to understand the market. They have to understand what is happening in the market. They may have an analyst or a business leader who's going to come in and guide them on that, but they really have to understand what the competitors are doing, what, where the market's going, what you know compliance regime you're working in and things like this. They they have to really understand their product and that's probably where many of them focus is understanding customer behavior and data like what have you? Have you instrumented your products so that you know where you're losing people and what's going on now and you know. We've been in a world where we can put metrics behind everything, but it doesn't mean everything has the data that you need to be able to track what's going on, right yeah, I'm understanding where your customers come from, too is yeah oh, absolutely.
Dave:
And which ones do you want to keep and which ones do you not right?
Peter:
which is actually one of the of the common problems that we see, of course, and it's like when you're making these decisions and this is actually where you were describing this earlier where it gets escalated to somebody saying, well, no, I have to have this people. And when you look at the numbers, you say, well, that's 5% of our customers and they represent 2% of the revenue. Why would we invest time and effort into that? Because we'd be far better off like investing over here and supporting the 80% of our client base that makes up that revenue. Yeah, absolutely.
Dave:
And those exact conversations going backwards and forwards. You want your product owner to be worried about that, not about user stories and delivery and things like this. I mean that's something, it's important, but it's operation. It's not the, it's not where the value is going to get created. And the other kind of one of the other quadrants that we want is that communication and analysis, and that touches on what you were just describing, which is what's the impact of a change we make. We may need to make a change from a regulatory perspective, but the consequence might be to put more workload on a call center or sales specialists and things like this.
Peter:
Or into claims. Yes, exactly.
Dave:
Yeah, or wherever it might be, and there needs to be that appreciation of it but also open conversation to make sure you may have to make that change urgently. But then how do you accommodate the additional workload? Is that recognized and being you know? Because it can now affect your customer satisfaction, it can affect service level agreements, lots of different kind of implications for a change that's not been thought through.
Peter:
Yeah, and it's the age old. Oh, this is just a temporary thing. We're just going to do this manually, temporarily, and anybody who's been in the organization for any length of time, of course, is going to go. Well, I know that's not going to be temporary.
Dave:
Well, spreadsheets that we're still using five days down the road right.
Peter:
Exactly. So it's really understanding, like, what are the consequences of this, and ensuring that there are mechanisms in place that temporary things really do need to be temporary. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Dave:
And I'm just trying to like as I think about the people that I really rate as product owners and product managers here. I think this is the differentiator between one of the key ones which may be a really useful takeaway, which is they talk about what they've learned through their experiences. You can't sit with them for very long before there's a narrative coming out about how they identified a cohort of their customer base that was underserved, or a cohort that seemed to be the most valuable one but actually was draining the profitability for a product. They talk about what's happening, what experiences they had, how they stay in touch with customers and learned from those interactions with customers and end users. So there's that sort of narrative element. So when you're that comes out so easily in any interview situation, you kind of can sit back and have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and just listen to them talk about what experiences they've actually lived through.
Peter:
I think that's a, that's a great one, I think. Uh, help you tailor the interview questions to find that perfect po yeah, perfect, um anything.
Dave:
I mean, we covered quite a a range of different things. Anything that you would add?
Peter:
oh well, did you have a couple of other sections on the wheel? Did you cover all of the pieces there?
Dave:
So I think so. So we covered this sort of you know, know your business, know the market, know your product side of things, the communication and the analysis. And maybe we'll touch on the analysis a little Before I come back to the analysis. The other one is delivery understanding how to get things out of the door, and that one is you know it's partially can you get changes out really, really rapidly? Dora metrics that we've talked about many times, and you know release frequency that we've talked about many times. As a product owner, we're antsy when we're not getting changes out in front of customers all the time, and those changes have to be high quality and so on. So there's that delivery aspect that comes into it.
Peter:
I think that's another important question to be asking as well, because I've definitely seen product owners where this is the furthest thing from their mind yeah, yeah, I see it like they drop requirements from a long, long way up and they just kind of drop and you've got three months get that out of the door.
Dave:
That's not product ownership. How are you, how are you enabling your teams to do the right things and move quickly and, and you know, future-proof their product as they're building on it, and so on?
Peter:
Yeah, there's loads of things to go with that, but analysis like that's the other thing.
Dave:
data driven decision-making requires great analysis, lots of data. Make sure you're instrumenting your product, you're using that data, you're spending time looking at it. So if we're looking for excellent product owners again in those stories, they're going to talk about the data. They're going to talk about how they use data to make decisions. That's what you're looking for. Decisions, that's what you're looking for, and as much as yes, I can have a data analyst that I rely on to bring the kind of deeper understanding of what we're seeing to the table. You can't get away from not being really adept with numbers and understanding how your product works yeah, yeah, I'd agree.
Peter:
I actually thinking of some interesting and affect people who are are effectively the product owners of things like change management, like technical change management, and the amount of data that they have and the insights they draw from that and how deep they can go into looking at all the different metrics with regards sort of well, how many changes have failed, which changes caused incidents, whether we like what, how many changes went through, at what level, what type of all of these types of things which are very valuable, and but they're looking at that entire system and like what all of those different pieces are and are we enabling change in the environment?
Dave:
And we've not touched on it. There's a whole bunch of things around, things like pricing and, you know, marketing channels to market, go to market strategies. There's a lot of additional things that we've not talked too much about. I would say I'd still kind of go back to the beginning, which is what sort of product owner, product manager do you need? Feature-driven is different to strategic P&L. Own the product and really build this out, and I think that's something that we can decide before we go out and talk to people.
Peter:
And that was really where I was trying to get at with that last point. You'll find people who own and treat things as products in potentially different parts of your organization too. If they exhibit these types of characteristics and they've got that understanding, then they're starting to, or they have those types of views of how they treat the area that they're managing.
Dave:
And one of the things that I'm really impressed with recently is, I'd say, there's two things. One is more and more product owners of internal systems, which internal systems, your HR, onboarding, offboarding systems, whatever it might be employee management, bunch of things that were just not well taken care of in the past. So I think that's a really interesting change that we're seeing as we're looking ahead.
Peter:
I think so. So, yeah, the IEOs you were asking earlier, they're sort of the summary points for this. Oh, yes, yes, yes, summary, because it's an interesting conversation. I've really enjoyed it. So I think the importance of data and being numerically adept and being able to think about that I think is a critical piece One of the ones that I drew out that we were talking about a little beforehand as well as the ability to work well with others to manage the different needs, because the product owner is getting bombarded from lots of different directions and getting many different requests.
Peter:
And being able to think about this as not just the external stakeholders but the internal stakeholders to all of the things that are coming onto the demands, so you can start to drive this. I really liked, too, what you were saying about understanding the engineering practices being a part of the PO, so not just drop a bunch of requirements in and wipe your hands and walk away, like understanding what it's going to take to get that in front of the customer and how you're going to learn from it, I think is a critical piece. Anything you would add?
Dave:
I'm just going to pull back to the stories and the narrative stuff. As you explore some of the ideas that we've been discussing, you're going to hear the stories come out. This is one of the things. It's so real when you deal with product owners, product managers, who really understand their products, as they use those stories to explain how they move forward, how they overcame challenges they may have had with the product, whatever it might be. So I think those stories really make things very or a really good indicator of high caliber product owners, product managers.
Peter:
I think that's great. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap up this conversation for today. As always, really enjoyed that, dave, and people can reach out to us at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom, and don't forget to hit subscribe. Thanks again, peter. Until next time. Until next time.
