As a product owner, adopting an entrepreneurial stance is crucial for steering your team towards success. I often think of this stance as embodying the visionary who gazes into the future, shaping the product backlog with insights and foresight. However, there are two key aspects that I believe every product owner must keep in mind to truly harness this entrepreneurial spirit.
1. Connecting the Team to Value
First and foremost, it’s essential to ensure that your team understands the value they are creating. This connection is often overlooked, yet it is fundamental to fostering a motivated and engaged team. Here’s how you can achieve this:
- Communicate the Vision: Regularly share the overarching vision and product goals with your team. This clarity helps everyone understand the ‘why’ behind their daily tasks.
- Set Clear Sprint Goals: Each sprint should have defined objectives that align with the product vision. This alignment reinforces the importance of their work and its impact on the overall goals.
- Encourage Open Dialogue: Foster an environment where team members feel comfortable discussing how their work contributes to the product’s success. This can lead to valuable insights and a stronger sense of ownership.
In my experience, when teams grasp the connection between their efforts and the product’s success, they become more invested in their work, leading to higher quality outcomes.
2. Making Evidence-Based Decisions
The second critical aspect is understanding where value originates and how to make informed decisions about it. I often ask product owners how they determine what is valuable. Too frequently, the response is, “I make it up as I go along.” While intuition can play a role, relying solely on gut feelings is not a sustainable strategy. Here’s how to shift towards a more evidence-based approach:
- Gather Relevant Data: Ensure you have access to the necessary information to make informed decisions. This includes understanding both current and unrealised value within your product.
- Utilise Evidence-Based Management: This approach allows you to assess your product’s current value and identify features that need to be developed. It’s about looking forward and making strategic decisions based on data rather than assumptions.
- Focus on Innovation Metrics: Track how much time your team spends on new initiatives versus maintaining existing features. This balance is crucial for long-term success. For instance, consider how Netflix evaluates its shows. They often cancel a series not because it’s bad, but because they believe investing in new content will yield a higher return. As a product owner, you must make similar decisions based on the data at your disposal.
Time to Market
Another vital metric to consider is your time to market. How swiftly can you transition from an idea to delivering a product to real users? This agility is essential in today’s fast-paced environment.
- Rapid Prototyping: Embrace limited series or pilot projects that allow you to test concepts quickly without the commitment of a full season. This approach not only manages user expectations but also provides valuable feedback that can inform future developments.
- User Feedback: Engage with users early and often. Their insights can guide your decisions and help you refine your product to better meet their needs.
In conclusion, as a product owner, embracing an entrepreneurial stance involves more than just vision; it requires a deep connection to the value being created and a commitment to making informed, evidence-based decisions. By focusing on these two areas, you can lead your team more effectively and drive your product towards success.
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Uh, what are the top two things that a product owner needs to bear in mind when adopting the entrepreneur stance? I kind of think of the entrepreneur stance as like the visionary looking forward to the future. And that’s where a lot of the stuff that ends up on your product backlog is going to be. This is just one part of being a product owner.
I think the two most important things to focus on are, one, connecting the team to the value that you’re creating. Does everybody on the team understand the connection between the work they’re doing every day and what it is we’re trying to achieve? Do they understand that connection? So that would be a lot around vision, communicating it, product goal, communicating it, sprint goals, right? Making that connection between the work that’s happening every day. I think that’s probably one of the most important things and the most common lacking things.
The other one is where the value comes from. One of the things that I find when I engage with product owners, the first thing I ask them is, how do you decide what’s valuable and what isn’t? Quite often, the answer is, I make it up as I go along, right? Which, while not necessarily 100% wrong, a lot of people have very good gut skills at reading the market, reading the information that they have. But really, we want to be taking a more evidence-based approach.
So from a product owner’s perspective, are you making decisions based on information? Do you even have the information that you can get? There’s going to be lots of hidden stuff, right? We’re still taking bets, we’re still taking risks. But do you have enough information to make more of the right decisions and less of the wrong decisions? For that, I usually look towards evidence-based management, right? Making sure that I understand my current value I have in the system, like our product, that’s our current value, puts features already in there, and our unrealised value, what are the stuff that we need to have in our system that we haven’t built yet? So kind of looking forward into the future.
But I also really consider our other more organisational capability-focused metrics, where I’m gathering data from both our ability to innovate, right? How much time do we spend on net new things versus existing things? That’s the same reason that we all get upset that Netflix is cancelling our favourite show, right? Because they do a season and the numbers are good, but they’re not amazing. And if they’re not amazing, they know that the second season is going to be less amazing than the first season because it just always is.
So they would rather invest that same money they would invest in doing a second season of an existing show into doing a first season of a brand new show that might be more likely to get a higher return on investment for that first show, right? We get all upset because they cancel our favourite show with their favourite characters, right? But in reality, they’re making commercial decisions based on the data and the analytics that they’re collecting from who’s watching all the shows and how they’re doing it. You need to do that as a product owner, right? That’s the product owner making those decisions based on the data.
So you’ve got your ability to innovate, and then you’ve also got your time to market, right? How quickly can you go from, same for Netflix as well, right? How quickly can you go from an idea to getting that thing in front of real users who are then able to give you feedback? Right? How quickly can you get stuff in front of them? And I think that’s, if you think in the movie TV show space, that’s why we’re seeing so many limited series now.
And that’s because we are unhappy with that false sense of we’re getting more later, right? We’re getting a second season and we’re hoping for a second season, and then we don’t get it. Whereas if they market it to us as it’s a limited series, we’re only making one. If something happens, we might make that, but we’re only making one. Then we don’t have that sense of loss as users. And that’s product ownership, right? They’re managing our expectations, they’re looking at where the next piece of value is coming from, how can we get different users, increase our market share into our product, and really understanding value and how it impacts on that.
And the decisions that you make get the data in there as well. That was thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else agile, scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
