September 13, 2023

3 Tips to Excel as a Product Owner - Mike Cohn

8 minutes

Tip # 1: Hold the Interruptions
What do good product owners tell the team once a sprint has been planned? That what they’ve been asked to develop will not change. But that’s a hard promise to keep when customers and stakeholders change their minds or come up with new needs!
In rare cases, it’s ok to interrupt. Some changes are very important and worth interrupting a sprint. But most are not.
Here are two things to do when you are tempted to bring up a change mid-sprint.
First, solicit the help of your Scrum Master. Give them explicit permission to push back against you anytime you want to bring something new into a sprint.
Second, try writing the new idea somewhere. You can add it to the product backlog and tag it to come up at the next refinement meeting. Or write the idea in an email to yourself, then schedule it to arrive the day before refinement (or sprint planning, if refinement has already happened). Getting the idea out of your head is often enough to keep you from interrupting.
Some teams just have lots of interruptions—most of them not from their product owner. Here are some ways to approach planning with interrupt-driven teams.
Tip #2: Remember that Every Yes Holds a Hidden No
As a product owner, your job is defining products or solutions that make people happy. You probably like saying yes to stakeholder requests.
Many product owners do not say no often enough.
But here’s why you should: For every request you say yes to, you are saying no to some other request. Put another way, every yes is a no to some future task.
Remember, requirements emerge as the team and customers learn more about the product. Customers, users, and others will continue to identify new needs throughout the product’s lifecycle.
If you’ve already committed the team’s time to something else, you are implicitly saying no to those as-yet unidentified requests.
So be careful about what you say yes to and be careful how far ahead you commit what a team will work on.
Six Guidelines to Help You Say No to Stakeholders
Tip #3: Listen and Act on Feedback
What’s one of the toughest things a product owner must do? Listen to—and actually act on—the feedback you receive.
As a product owner it’s easy to get overly attached to your own vision for what you’re building. To be successful, you need instead to listen to customers, users, stakeholders, and yes, your developers too!
You don’t need to do everything any of them suggest. (Remember the mistake of not saying no often enough) Good products become great, though, when you listen to and act on feedback.
Seven Ways to Get and Improve Fast Feedback
Allowing teams to focus, remembering that every yes has a cost, and letting go of your own ideas (just a little) will help you grow as a product owner and succeed with agile,