Product Owner Stances – Preferred Stances

Product Owner plays a vital part in guiding the development of a successful product. However, there are Product Owner Stances that should be adopted to maximize their effectiveness and contribute to the product’s overall success. There are preferred & misunderstood Product Owner Stances. There are six key preferred and six key misunderstood stances of a product owner discovered in many organizations. In this article, we will discuss the preferred Product Owner stances – “The Visionary, The Customer Representative, The Decision Maker, The Collaborator, The Influencer, and The Experimenter.”

Product Owner Stances – The Visionary

Create and clearly communicate the product vision, strategy, business goals, and objectives. Their main focus is on the future, on changing the status quo, and on helping people to see what could be, instead of what is. The Visionary is also called the Inspirator, Challenger of the Status Quo, Dreamer, or Imaginative Product Owner.

Pattern: The Product Owner has a clear vision of the product and its future direction.

Impact: Helps align the development efforts with the long-term goals and strategy of the organization.

Tips: Communicate the product vision regularly to the team, stakeholders, and customers. Seek feedback to ensure alignment and adapt the vision if necessary.

Benefits of Visionary PO

• Scrum Teams will be more self-organized and able to make more day-to-day decisions but also contribute to the vision and strategy by offering their knowledge and insights.

• When an individual understands and aligns with the core values and vision of the organization, they can readily commit to, and engage in, the organization’s efforts.

• When the team understands and buy-in to the organization’s vision statement, it brings them together. Acts as a unifying force, motivating everyone to work for the same goal.

• The scrum team always remains on the right track because they know where they are heading.

• The visionary product owner can lead to improved product usage, increased revenues, improved total cost of ownership, and increased customer satisfaction.

Product Owner Stances – The Customer Representative

Focused on helping others (Dev. Team or others) to understand what customers need, what their challenges are, and what pains and gains they have. They tend to explain how our work affects customers, users, and business processes.

Pattern: The Product Owner represents the voice of the customer.

Impact: Ensures customer needs are understood and incorporated into the product, resulting in improved user satisfaction.

Tips: Engage with customers through feedback loops, user research, and usability testing. Actively gather and prioritize customer requirements to deliver value.

Benefits of Customer Representative PO

• The Development Team(s) have a greater understanding of the actual, and real customers and users. So focus on long-term goals.

• With this increased understanding of users and customers, including their pains and gains and what they’re trying to achieve, the Development Teams can build a better product or service, that better fits the customer needs.

• The Development Teams become more and more self-organizing because they can relate to and empathize with customers and users.

• It results in increased Customer Satisfaction and a better Net Promoter Score.

Product Owner Stances – The Decision Maker

Helps the stakeholders and Scrum Team to keep time-to-market short, by keeping decision-making time short. Knowing everything about the product: its marketing value, how it is performing right now, and what is its technical state. This helps them make informed decisions. 

Pattern: The Product Owner makes informed and timely decisions.

Impact: Enables the team to move forward by resolving conflicts, prioritizing backlog items, and making trade-offs.

Tips: Gather necessary information, involve stakeholders in decision-making when appropriate, and use data-driven insights to make informed choices.

Benefits of Decision Maker PO

• Reduction in the cycle time as they (POs) make decisions quickly.

• The stakeholders can rely on these product owners because they can handle many things independently.

Product Owner Stances – The Collaborator

Engaging with, and closely working together with the various stakeholders and Development Team(s). Support people in their own discovery process, whether it’s about defining goals, clarifying PBIs, or analyzing customer needs.

Pattern: The Product Owner actively collaborates with the development team, stakeholders, and other Scrum roles.

Impact: Promotes a shared understanding, facilitates communication, and fosters a collaborative environment.

Tips: Conduct regular meetings with the team, involve stakeholders in backlog refinement, and seek input and feedback from all relevant parties.

Benefits of Collaborator PO

• Better alignment helps a clear understanding of the user requirements.

• Self-organized, motivated team & flexibility in an organization.

• Better communication helps great alignment with stakeholders which in turn helps value to be delivered faster to the marketplace.

Product Owner Stances – The Influencer

Helps the stakeholders to align around the product vision, strategy, goals, and objectives. Influencing the stakeholders and Scrum Team is a hard but very important job. Uses effective communication, negotiation, and influencing skills to get people to join the cause.

Pattern: The Product Owner influences and persuades stakeholders toward the product vision and goals.

Impact: Drives alignment and support, resolves conflicts, and ensures stakeholder engagement throughout the development process.

Tips: Develop strong communication and negotiation skills, build relationships with stakeholders, and present compelling arguments based on data and insights.

Benefits of Influencer PO

• PO is able to build a united force, having a positive impact on organizational effectiveness.

• Inspired by a strong vision, influencers manage to achieve buy-in amongst people and bring them together to work towards a shared goal.

• Influencer product owners have a better alignment with stakeholders, customers, and end-users. Hence, they can support your product to become successful.

Product Owner Stances – The Experimenter

Stating a hypothesis, explaining what we know AND what we don’t know, by seeing a lot of the work we do as experiments, rather than ‘set-in-stone’ work packages. Understands the need to try out new things, explore, innovate, and therefore experiment.

Pattern: The Product Owner embraces experimentation and adapts to changes.

Impact: Encourages innovation, allows for learning from failures, and enables the product to evolve based on market feedback.

Tips: Foster a culture of experimentation, encourage the team to explore new ideas, and create a safe environment to learn from experiments.

Benefits of Experimenter PO

• The innovation rate improves and costs get reduced significantly.

• Technical Debt is reduced.

• Time to Market is also reduced.

• High-quality products and services are more likely to meet customer and user needs.

• Happiness and morale of the Scrum Team increase.

Conclusion

A successful Product Owner in Scrum embodies multiple stances that contribute to effective product development. By embracing the visionary, customer representative, decision-maker, collaborator, influencer, and experimenter roles, Product Owners can drive value, alignment, and innovation. Understanding these stances, and their impact, and implementing the suggested tips will enhance the effectiveness of Product Owners in Scrum, leading to successful product outcomes.

Product Owner Maturity Levels – Click Here

Misunderstood Stances of Product Owners – Click Here