How good is the APSPO course in helping leaders determine product direction and Why?

So how how good is the pspoa course in helping leaders determine product direction and why?

Well, I for me this is one of those ones where well it doesn’t right leaders should determine product direction the course isn’t going to tell them how to do that.

Um but there are tools in the pspoa that will help leaders and product owners understand what are the things that they’re not doing that they probably should be doing.

Right a lot of product owners are not great product owners only because they aren’t necessarily focused on the breadth of product ownership.

So for example many product owners focus solely on the aspect of being a great customer advocate.

Right but in being a great customer advocate they sometimes leave the innovator to the side whereas they should be an innovator as well.

And that gap means that they’re not being the best product owner they can be.

What are those gaps?

Um yeah I was talking about the difference between the customer advocate and the innovator.

And the product owners quite often focus on just that one thing when they should be focusing on many different things.

In the pspoa we talk about six possible focuses not maybe the only focuses but six possible focuses of the product owner and we talk about them as the stances of the product owner.

What’s the position that they take on a particular topic and it’s important to mix and match although we talk about them in isolation.

Um but we talk about we talk about the visionary or the Steve Jobs type right you’re trying to figure out what the next big move is that’s not necessarily driven by customer demand because customers might be demanding this route but actually the next big innovation is over here.

How do you get to that?

Um product owners need to focus on they need they need a lot of people to agree and understand what it is they’re doing.

Right product owner is a very political position because you’ve you’ve got you’re you’re being given money by the business to go build successful products.

And if the business don’t believe you’re building successful products they’re not going to give you any more money.

If key stakeholders go moaning to the business that you’re not doing what they want you might be in trouble of not getting money.

If developers don’t understand what it is that you’re trying to create and are behind your vision they’re not going to be involved in it enough and you’re not going to be able to actually get there and get across that line.

So there’s kind of this box of the collaborator right of connecting all of these people understanding what they need.

I think it should be called the politician rather the collaborator right because you’ve got to get everybody going in the same direction.

You’ve got a vision for the product and how do you get everybody behind it so that you can maintain focus and direction?

And I’ve kind of talked about the customer representative that relentless customer focus as well that’s important right it’s part of that story but also just being able to make decisions.

I think there’s a there’s a there’s a uh is a parable is it a it’s a definitely a phrase that’s better to make a decision that’s wrong than not make a decision at all.

I’ve heard that before and that’s sometimes what a product owner needs to do is there are two ways to build it and nobody can make a decision and the product owner doesn’t have enough information so pick one and try it.

Right pick one and try it or pick both and try a little bit of both right just make a decision so that we can move forward and if we move forward and we’ve made the wrong decisions ah we made the wrong decision let’s go you know pull back and go this other route.

That need to be that decision maker.

Um and I talked about the experimenter already right focusing on what’s the next big innovation.

So there’s a visionary what’s the next big innovation but there’s also this experimenter which is what’s the iterative innovation of what it is we’ve created.

What’s the next little experiment we can run to try and see whether what we might get down the line?

And I think bringing all of those together as examples of what might be missing from your role as a product owner or as a leader in your business helps open up those ideas and create a deeper understanding of what type of product owner people want to be.

And what direction they want to take their business and their product and their teams.

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