A roadmap to serenity How
to stay sane as a Product Owner Rian van der Merwe @RianVDM rian@elezea.com

Distance Joy Starting line The
stride Last mile begins Finish line First mile done

Project timeline Starting line The
stride Finish line Sanitylevel First mile done Last mile begins

The Product Owner represents the
voice of the customer. He/she ensures that the Scrum Team works with the right things from a business perspective. The Product Owner writes customer-centric items (typically user stories), prioritizes them and then places them in the product backlog. “ The Product Manager is responsible for delivering measurable business results through product solutions that meet both market needs and company goals. “

First
mile
problems

Aligning the team

These have their feet firmly
planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between. …rise above the specifics of a particular problem to think about them in a more abstract, and in some ways, more general way. “ http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2009/id20090713_332802.htm

Head in the clouds Communicate
a vision Show how you plan to get there And I do mean SHOW (yes, use pictures) Remain flexible Be in the details Communicate clear expectations, then trust Don’t hover! Learn what you don’t know Feet on the ground

For creative thinkers, [there are]
three key motivators: autonomy (self-directed work), mastery (getting better at stuff), and purpose (serving a greater vision). All three are intrinsic motivators. As creative thinkers, we want to make progress, and we want to move big ideas forward. So, it's no surprise that the best motivator is being empowered to take action. When it comes to recommendations for creative leaders, [authors of a recent study] don’t mince words: “Scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals autocratically, being indecisive, or holding up resources.” In short, give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way. http://the99percent.com/articles/6943/what-motivates-us-to-do-great-work “

Stakeholder buy-in

Design by committee

Design by committee In a
hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence “ {The Peter Principle}

Design by committee The Dunning–Kruger
effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self- confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “

Product should be a dictatorship,
not consensus-driven. There are casualties, hurt feelings, angry users. But all of those things are necessary if you’re going to create something unique. The iPhone is clearly a vision of a single core team, or maybe even one man. It happened to be a good dream, and that device now dominates mobile culture. But it’s extremely unlikely Apple would have ever built it if they conducted lots of focus groups and customer outreach first. No keyboard? Please. -- Michael Arrington “

Design by committee The sensible
answer is to listen, absorb, discuss, be able to defend any design decision with clarity and reason, know when to pick your battles and know when to let go. “ Respond to every piece of feedback Note what feedback is being incorporated Explain why feedback is not being taken Use the UX validation stack

The user experience validation stack
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/winning-a-user-experience-debate/

Last mile
problems

People issues

Silence vs. Violence Masking Avoiding
Withdrawing Controlling Labeling Attacking

Commit to seek mutual purpose
Recognise the purpose behind the strategy Invent a mutual purpose Brainstorm new strategies Making it safe

Delivery issues

It’s important to know the
business inside and out and have a clear trajectory where we’re headed. But there is a point where planning becomes overplanning. All that time spent planning is time spent not doing. http://tomfishburne.com/2010/10/waterfall-planning.html “

I’ve been working on a
way to balance the benefits of Gantt charts (ability to input dependencies and adjust an entire schedule with the push of a button) with the best way to communicate project schedules to clients. Most people can’t read a Gantt chart, and no client should have to. Gantt charts are more useful for planning next steps than providing an at-a-glance project status anyway. “ http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/project_managers_not_calendar.php

Meetings may be toxic, but
calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time. “ http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/the_chokehold_of_calendars.php

Sell a team driven by:
Priorities Action Timelines Meetings

A few notes on distributed
teams Meet in person. Now. Be respectful of time zones. Use the right technology.

A few notes on distributed
teams Meet in person. Now. Be respectful of time zones. Use the right technology. Keep it human.

A few notes on distributed
teams Meet in person. Now. Be respectful of time zones. Use the right technology. Keep it human. Trust each other.

A few notes on distributed
teams Meet in person. Now. Be respectful of time zones. Use the right technology. Keep it human. Trust each other. Don’t stop talking, especially if you disagree.

A roadmap to serenity How
to stay sane as a Product Owner Rian van der Merwe @RianVDM rian@elezea.com