Review Practical product management for product owners

The book is built around the six preferred stances of a product owner. It starts with an introduction of misunderstood and the preferred stances of a product owner. Stances are attitudes and behaviors that product owners display at times.

Misunderstood stances of a product owner

Stance	Also referred to as
Clerk	Admin, secretary, writer, yes man, order taker
Story writer	Analyst, technical writer, legacy copycat, scribe, note taker
Project manager	Velocity maximizer, resource utilization maximizer, wish list administrator, sidekick to management, progress reporter
Subject matter expert	Senior user, key user, process manager, domain expert, business expert
Gatekeeper	Protector, guard, shield, gateway, single point of contact (spoc)
Manager	Team boss, team lead, technical lead, product owner & scrum master, HR-responsible person

Preferred stances of a product owner

Stance	Simple sentence	Explanation	Also referred to as
Visionary	It is not about where we are, it’s about where we want to be.	Visionary product owners have a clear vision (or dream) for the future, they actively challenge the status quo, and are generally seen as inspiring leaders to follow.	Inspirator, challenger of the status quo, dreamer, imaginative product owner
Collaborator	Let’s get stuff done, together	Collaborators are team players who place the well-being of the team ahead of the well-being of themselves. Collaborators are open and transparent. They pro-actively share information, insights, and knowledge. They listen to understand, not to respond.	Team player, team worker
Customer representative	What’s the problem to solve for customers and/or users?	Customer representatives tend to focus on helping other people	Customer advocate, voice of the customer, user representative, user advocate, voice of the user
Decision maker	Look at the data and look forward	Decision makers help the stakeholders and team to keep time-to-market short by keeping decision-making time short.	–
Experimenter	What is the smallest experiment we can run to validate that idea?	Experimenters explain what we know AND what we don’t know. They state hypotheses and assumptions instead of stories and requirements.	–
Influencer	How can I align people to do what is best for the product?	Influencers get things done without exercising formal authority over a person or team. They act and speak in ways that may hardly be noticed when present but are dearly missed when they are gone.	Politician

Customer representative 

In this section you get an explanation how to identify and define a product using the 5 Ps (problem, pervasive, pay, positioning and possible), what it means to build customer empathy, and how you can capture your customer insights via personas. Identifying and expressing customer value and connecting product features to outcomes and impacts complements this section.

A great customer representative product owner does:

• Name the customer and user
• Value listening over talking
• Identify customer and user needs
• Understanding the why of the customer
• Identifying customer value

Value is explained by using the business to consumer value pyramid which shows four levels and elements of value: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social-impact elements.

Visionary

This section brings together the creation and communication of the product vision, the product goals and underlying product roadmap as well as the company value (based on Evidence-Based Management) and maximizing it through pricing strategies and tactics.

A great visionary product owner does:

• Personally belief in the vision.
• Think of what might be, forget about what is.
• Be imaginative and focus on the bigger picture.
• Apply storytelling to the vision (use the 3×3 storytelling framework, make it SEXI: for each Statement an EXplanation and Illustration).
• Are inclusive, not exclusive.
• Are never afraid of failures.

Product goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely) or INVEST (independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, trestable), are market or customer driven, should be ambitious, yet achievable, are measurable (e.g. Evidence-Based Management, or pirate metrics AARRR (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue) or Google’s HEART (happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, task success) framework metrics.

The authors describe several techniques to help you with the product backlog refinement and give five commonly used product roadmaps including tips to create them: goal-oriented roadmap, now-next-later roadmap, user story map, visual roadmap, Gantt chart roadmap. 

Experimenter

Here we get what it means to drive inside-out, outside-in product innovation or business model innovation. How can we design and evaluate experiments and test. And when successful what does it mean for scaling products and teams.

Some characteristics of great experimenter product owners are:

• Are brilliantly lazy.
• Pursue multiple options.
• Embrace paradoxical thinking and keep themselves updated.

In total 7 experimentation techniques are explained: paper prototyping, preorder page, explanation videos, landing pages, feature fake/fake door, concierge MVP and Wizard of Oz.

Decision maker

Decision maker product owners are improving accountability, maturity, and authority. As a decision maker product owner, you don’t need to make all decisions. When teams are more mature, they can make more decisions. A delegation poker-based technique is a great instrument to use. Decisions to be made are product vision, product strategy, business model, value proposition, go-to market strategy, legal/compliance requirements, products to include in the product portfolio, whether to add, remove or bundle products/feature sets or services. To make better decisions you must think in bets, understand the dilemmas, and make them fast (decision latency theory as the Standish Group has published).

Some characteristics of great decision maker product owners are:

• Call the shots.
• Pace car
• Salesman
• We are together.
• Democratic
• Coaching.

Collaborator

Product owners are affected by agile governance. It’s the collaborator product owner who does the product budgeting in an agile way and create contracts that enable great product ownership and teamwork (fixed-price, time-and-material, two-stage, Joe’s bucket, agile contracts).

Organizational governance entails many elements like risk management, product documentation, facilitation of meetings, performance coaching, quality control, capacity management, organizational culture, roles & accountabilities, business goals and objectives, release management, process interventions, change management, incident management, escalation procedures, finances & budgeting, internal auditing, external auditing, mission, vision & strategy, decision making & delegating, product management, contract & vendor management, legal standards & compliance, process management, personal coaching, product development process, go-to-market approach, customer & market research approach, and many more.

Great collaborator product owners do:

• Are open and transparent.
• Say what they do and do what they say.
• Allow for a little give and take.
• Listen to understand, not to respond.
• Are open to other options, are willing to compromise.
• Are kind to those they collaborate with.
• Understand that they need to step up.

Influencer

Stakeholders are key. As an influencer product owner, you are often working in a complex environment and you must classify and group (user, provider, governance, influencers) your stakeholders (e.g., using the stakeholder map, the stakeholder radar), apply the right stakeholder management strategies and tactics and influence stakeholders (eagle, peacock, penguin, owl) at all levels (message, process, relationship, emotions).

Great influencer product owners do:

• Be honest. Always
• Be compassionate.
• Be flexible and listen.
• Share credits, take the blame.
• Build networks.
• Bend reality.
• Are familiar with the word no!

The following tips to improve your stakeholder management in practice, are elaborated:

1. Start saying no to your stakeholders more often (mastering the art of NO to optimize value creation for the product)
2. Treat different stakeholders differently.
3. Manage the system, not the people.
4. Don’t forget the customer.
5. Increase your authority by acting like an owner.
6. Know the stakeholders’ interest by heart.
7. Involve your scrum master.
8. Don’t be the carrier pigion between the scrum team and the stakeholders.

Conclusion. Practical product management for product owners is an awesome book for product owners and provides effective behaviors, useful tools, concepts, techniques, and many examples to become great product owners. The usage of the stance concept with visionary, collaborator, customer representative, decision maker, experimenter and influencer product owners helps to understand when to use which attitudes and behaviors. A must read for product owners.

To order: managementboek.nl, bol.com