Product Owner Misfunctions that Distract You From Product Work
4 common distractive roles of Product Owners and natural strategies to circumvent them
The job of a Product Owner is very creative in the sense that our daily work does not come pre-established, but we have to organize our day and come up with our own tasks instead.
We strive for efficiency and maximizing value generation. This leads us to a constant self-evaluation. We continuously ask ourselves whether we are truly doing what could bring the most user value, whether we are identifying the best opportunities, or whether we are unblocking the most critical path.
And when we come across challenges, this continuous hesitancy tricks us into shifting towards different roles or tasks that certainly deviate us from our product work in favor of solving something more efficiently or achieving a particular goal earlier.
This is the paradigm of short-term reward versus long-term success.
We can easily fall into such toxic patterns for our product-centric job. We should be able to identify at least the most common ones:
The assistant
According to my experience, this happens most often at Sprint Review meetings. Upon feedback, the team needs to re-evaluate something we just worked on, conceptually or technical-wise. Who organizes, facilitates and ensures the meeting reaches a satisfactory outcome?
Needless to say, Product people build skills through their jobs to excel at these tasks. However, that does not mean that we shall become the moderator and the only member that cares about reaching a conclusion.
Pro Tip: Such operational activities are beneficial to all members involved, and while we can take a hit for the team from time to time, so does every other team member. We should encourage our peers to step up and also experiment with this duty.
Our role is extremely more valuable by being the voice of the user when participating in such meetings.
The people manager
Considering the motivations of our team members is a key for success at our jobs. Integrating those into our development process can help us boosting overall quality, accelerate progress, and even uncover new opportunities.
But we cannot act as the representative of the company on how to keep our team members engaged at their jobs, nor can support them developing their career paths. Often we are left by the organization to tackle these within our product duties.
In order to shed light with some examples, I have come across team members wishing to pivot their expertise towards a new technology and wanting to re-write our application, or a team composed only by senior-level members that were not interested in working on “basic” tasks even though they were important to our users.
An easy way to identify when we deviate towards these people manager tasks is to ask ourselves whether a given decision was taken to solve a user problem and consequently improve our product, or whether it was merely driven to satisfy the need of a team member.
Pro Tip: If we find ourselves often in this position, we should establish an open channel with the responsible person at our organization for employee growth, so that we can continuously share our feedback and perspective without taking the responsibility over the growth itself.
The project manager
The advantages and disadvantages of the project versus product mindsets are well described all over Agile literature. In this article, we refer specifically to the tendency to switch to project manager mode, sometimes unnoticed.
Most times this occurs when working together with other departments that might not understand at first the Product Owner role. They might expect coordination to be needed in order to create a false feeling of control. This commonly originates from the fear of our uncertain environment, which we accept and work along with it, while this is still not a common practice outside the Agile community.
We can identify we are falling into the project trap when we find ourselves with duties to report to someone who cannot have any action out of the information we are providing them. Unfortunately, this is not easy to recognize as sometimes it can be falsely called transparency and alignment, while other times these come as lengthy timeline-based roadmaps or Gantt charts.
To remark the difference, genuine transparency and alignment contain non-tailored information for everyone to understand. This is the reason why Sprint Reviews are open sessions where everyone is invited to participate in, including our customers and users.
Pro Tip: My preferred solution for expectation management is investing time in creating contracts with all my peers, expressing clear expectations towards each other, defining responsibility split, and addressing potential failure scenarios together.
The intern
The Product Owner title is relatively new within the industry and the role is left to the interpretation of the companies incorporating it into their organizations.
During the hiring process, it is common to search for a polyvalent profile that fits within the T-shape mindset. Sometimes, we can do so many different things that we end up doing what nobody else wants to do.
I can name a few examples I have experienced myself over the years: packing orders, sending customers payment reminders, creating invoices, and in general, manual repetitive tasks.
Our goal is to solve users’ problems, even if that means deviating from our own work to achieve it. However, when stepping back from our role, we face the risk of losing touch with our users. This will certainly have a negative impact on our product, for example ending up building solutions that nobody needs.
Pro Tip: The most recurring reason for us to switch to “intern” mode is the lack of esteem for our own work. We spend so much time thinking about how to improve things that by definition we underestimate our doing, given that there are always even better ways to do it. This makes it difficult for us to justify why we should not do what others will not do.
In another article I will tackle this aspect in-depth, as in my view, this is also the reason why we often volunteer for more than we can handle and end up performing poorly at our job.
If this was helpful to you, help me spread the word by clicking a few times on the clapping 👏 button. And if you have come across any other patterns or have further tips, please leave a comment and tell us about it!
