Product Owner — Maximizing the Business Value delivered by an Agile team !
Have you come across a situation when an Agile team has delivered one or more successful sprints but when the product was released, the business gave a totally unexpected reaction? Business had a different view of the product in mind but the agile team believes they have developed everything as per the stories in the backlog. So what really went wrong? Where was the gap and who was rightfully responsible to ensure that this situation never arose?
If you have been in the Software world, then there is barely a chance that you would not have come across this situation — whether it was the era of Waterfall or the currently adopted Agile methodology!
This is where the role of an efficient Product Owner becomes really crucial and inevitable too for the agile teams to deliver value to the business faster and hence achieve quicker time to market!
How is Agile important in current market?
Few years ago, requirements were provided by the business in bigger chunks and IT teams used to develop and deliver them as big production releases as per the SDLC cycle followed in the Waterfall model. In the last few years, the business dynamics have drastically changed. As per the research done by Harward Business School, there are 30,000 consumer products launched every year out of which 80% fail. Due to fast-paced market changes and fierce competition where companies like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook are pushing a deployment every few minutes, it has become very crucial for companies to stay relevant in the market and deliver business value at the same fast pace. What is trending now becomes obsolete in a few months, and consumer behavior and habits keep changing at the same rate.
Hence, to challenge the rapidly evolving technology trends, market demands and to attract maximum customers, organizations need to have shorter cycles of development and deployment supported by quick feedback from the business. The iterative and incremental approach of development in Agile helps in reaching market faster.
“Agile” in today’s IT world is the most common terminology. This was first introduced in 1980s and it has been very much in use for more than a decade by pioneers like Thoughtworks but it is only in the last few years that this has become a way of working! So what does this tell us?
“Companies need to move with agility using Agile.”
They need to respond faster to the market needs and demands. Just to talk of one example of how fast business evolves — Uber, which has established a new way of transportation in US entered Indian market in 2013. After finding its footing in India, they came up with a different business model diversifying into online food delivery and started Uber Eats. An excellent way to respond as per the market trends!
Agile prescribes certain principles in its manifesto to be followed in order to achieve maximum efficiency gain from a cross-functional agile team.
Why has the role of a Product Owner become important now?
Though the role of a manager in Agile teams is considered obsolete since the agile teams are supposed to be self-managing and self-organizing teams…. But are they self-sufficient? Can they deliver the expected business value on their own? Not really!
This is where a Product owner is needed — to connect the Agile teams, the Business and the Customer, to not just deliver a good quality product but to maximize the return on investment! Product owner is the one who ensures the product is moving as per the evolving market trends by leveraging the benefits of Agile.
What value does a Product Owner bring?
Product owner is a project’s key stakeholder. Product owner needs to have a clear vision about what the business wants, how the market is moving and is responsible to create a strategic roadmap of the product.
Product owner is that “One Voice of the Customer”. Key responsibilities to name are:
- Conveys the vision of the product to the agile team,
- Owns the product backlog,
- Accelerates the delivery by prioritizing the requirements,
- Gets continuous feedback from the business,
- Ensures there are no blockages for the team,
- Sees what the team is building and whether they are building it right.
In summary, primary job of a product owner is to bring the business and development together which is driven by the DevOps model. As the name suggests, it combines software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) to reduce the overall deploymentlife cycle and deliver faster. Agile and DevOps is all about creating a mindset and a cultural shift in the teams, basing its philosophy more on Trust, Transparency, Independence and Discipline. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous deployment (CD) processes in the DevOps model have made it possible for a product owner to deliver and deploy successful releases to the business tremendously faster than before.
A good Product Owner typically drives delivery in three key areas….
What is the main problem a Product Owner addresses?
It is an ongoing challenge to not being able to engage the business in the Software projects. A product owner, as a “face-off” of the business is instrumental in bridging that gap. With the help of the Agile and DevOps model, it has become easy and important to engage the business earlier in the project rather than at the final user testing stage. The benefits of fast failure and fast recovery is now being gradually realized by the business and hence is being encouraged. A Product owner being an interface between the business and the development team is able to smoothen and expedite the overall delivery process by improving impediments.
What are the road blockers for Product Owners mostly?
There are a few challenges in this role since the product owner is the main visionary of the product and has key responsibilities for the success of the product. But in my opinion, there are three main road blockers that product owners typically face:
- Lack of empowerment: Business Stakeholders don’t let the product owner make decisions. Infact, some organizations have come up with their own interpretation of this role by assigning something called “Proxy product owner” role to maybe a business analyst or an onshore agile lead in the team, but does not have an overall vision of the product and does not have any decision making power with respect to the product. This kind of dilutes the essence of this role.
- Lack of IT exposure in Business stakeholders: In most organizations, business doesn’t seem to have the required knowledge and exposure in IT. Since they are not exposed or trained in Agile and DevOps practices and the value it brings, it is difficult to get a buy-in from them. Product owners need to have really good negotiation skills to influence the business in such cases.
- Lack of domain knowledge: If the product owner does not have prior experience in the same industry/domain, then lack of that knowledge becomes a blocker for the product owner in defining a good futuristic vision of the product.
Product owner is like a punching bag at times, caught up between the business and the agile team. The toughest part is to influence and get the work done without authority.
Considering the value that a product owner can bring to an agile team, the organizations have started implementing this role in their team structure but there is still a long way to go, for this to become a norm.
Final thoughts…
Agile is the way to go despite certain limitations. Unknowingly, Agile is already used in achieving our personal goals too (as it is more common sense than anything else) and we are already playing the role of product owners in our own lives . With the use of different apps freely available, I have become used to track and monitor my personal and professional tasks by putting them in different buckets like “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done” (Kanban process). Now with easy to use Agile tools like Trello (also available as mobile apps), Agile is on our finger tips!
Note: This article is my opinion based on my experience in the IT industry. Please feel free to share your comments in the box below.
