The Product Owner Role

What concerns me in regards to the Product Owner role: it's so horribly diluted by many organizations that sometimes, practitioners ask me "What's the meaning of my work, and what should I do in order to my job well?"

There's so much garbage out there on the Internet regarding the Product Owner Role that it's very difficult for someone without significant experience to discern what's a proper definition that would help both companies define proper job descriptions, and provide guidance to PO practitioners how to improve. So - let me give you my perspective.

Great Product Ownership

I would classify great Product Ownership into four key domains:

While one of the core responsibilities of the Product Owner is the Product Backlog, it should be nothing more than the expression of the Product Owner's intent. And this intent should be defined by acting on these four domains.

Product Leadership

The Product Owner should be providing vision and clarity to the team, the product's stakeholders, customers and users alike.

Product Vision

Who is better than the Product Owner at understanding what the product is, which problem it solves, why it's needed and where it's going? Great Product Owners build this vision, own it and inspire others to follow them in their pursuit of making it happen.

This vision then needs to be made specific by elaborating long-term, mid-term and short-term objectives - a guiding visionary goal, an actionable product goal and the immediate sprint goal.

Clarity of Purpose

While the Vision is often a bit lofty, developers need substantial clarity on "what happens now, what happens next?" - and customers will want to know "what's in it - for me?" The Product Owner must be crystal clear on where the product currently is, and where it's going next. They must be able to clearly articulate what the next steps are - and what the next steps are not. They need to be able to state at any given point in time what the highest priority is, and why that is so.

The Product Backlog is then the place where the PO maintains and communicates the order of upcoming objectives and content.

Communication

The Product Owner must communicate their product with both internal and external stakeholders. Life is never easy, so they must rally supporters, build rapport with sponsors, and resolve the inevitable conflicts amongst the various groups of interest.

Networking

The product can only be as successful as the support it receives. As such, the Product Owner must build a broad network of supporters, and continuously maintain and grow their influence in their organization - and for the product's market. Keeping a close eye on stakeholder satisfaction and interest, continuously re-kindling the fire of attention drawn to the product is essential in sustaining and fostering the product.

Diplomacy

As soon as multiple people are involved, there tend to be conflicts of interest. Even if there is only one single stakeholder, that stakeholder has choices to make, and may need to resolve between conflicting priorities themselves.

In peace times, the Product Owner builds common ground with stakeholders, so that they are more likely to speak positively of the product.

In times of crisis, the Product Owner understands the sources of conflict, ebbs the waves, reconciles differences, brings people together to work out positive solutions, and mends wounds.

Insight

The Product Owner is the go-to source for both the team and the product's stakeholders when they want to know something about the product's purpose or intent. The Product Owner has both factual knowledge and inspiring stories to share.

Product Knowledge

Caution - the Product Owner isn't a personified Product Instruction Manual, and they don't need to be. Much rather, they should be the people to be able to explain why the product currently is the way it is, and why it's going to be the way it's going to be. They must be able to fully understand the product's capabilities and purpose - and they must be able to convey why these are good choices. 

From a more negative take, the Product Owner must understand the weaknesses of the current product and have ideas how to leverage or compensate these.

And for all of this, the Product Owner should have the domain expertise, market information and hard data to back up their statements.

Storytelling

"Facts tell, stories sell." - the Product Owner's role is to sell the product, both to the team, and to the customers. They should be able to tell a relatable, realistic story of what users want to and/or are doing with the product, what their current pains are, and what their future benefits will be.

"Speaking to pain and pleasure" is the game - touch hearts and minds alike. The Product Owner should be NEAR their users, and bring developers NEAR as well.

Business Acument

The Product Owner's primary responsibility is to maximize the value of the product, by prioritizing the highest value first, and by making economically sensible choices both in terms of obtaining funding and spending.

Value Decisions

There are three key value decisions a Product Owner faces every day:

1. What is our value proposal - and what isn't?
2. What value will we deliver now, and what later?
3. What is not part of our value proposal, and will therefore not be delivered at all?

The question oftentimes isn't whether the customer needs something, but whether they need it so urgently that other things have to be deferred or be ditched.

When anyone, customer or developer alike, asks the Product Owner what is on the agenda today, this week, or this month - the Product Owner must be able to answer in a way that the underlying value statements are clear to all.

Economics

With infinite money and infinite time, you could build everything - but since we don't have that luxury, the Product Owner must make investment decisions - what is a positive business case, what is a negative business case, what can we afford to do - and what can we afford to not do?

The Product Owner should be able to understand the economical impact of any choices they make: More people can do more work, but burn the budget faster. Every feature has an opportunity cost - all other features that get deferred because of it. Fines could be cheaper than implementations, so not everything "mandatory" must be done. These are just a few.

There is often no straightforward answer to "What should we spend our money on this month?" - and considering all of the trade-offs from every potential economic angle before bringing product related decisions to the team or towards stakeholders is quite a complex endeavour.

Economic decisions need to then be transported transparently towards the relevant organizational stakeholders - to team members, who may not understand where priorities come from, to customers who may not understand why they don't get their request served - to managers, who may not understand why yesterday's plan is already invalid.

Given all of these Product Owner responsibilities above, it should be quite clear that the Product Owner must focus and has little time to take care of things that are ...

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Not the Product Owner's concern

Three domains are often seen as expectations on the Product Owner, which are actually a distraction from their responsibilities, and putting them onto the PO's shoulders actually steals the time they need in order to do the things that make them a good Product Owner:

Project Management

The Product Owner is not responsible for creating a project plan, tracking its progress or reporting status.

Let's briefly describe how this is supposed to happen:

Planning is a collaborative whole-team exercise, and while the Product Owner participates and provides context, a goal and a sorted backlog as input, they are merely contributing as the team creates their plan.

Developers are autonomous in their work, and the Product Owner should rely on being requested for feedback whenever there's visible progress or any impediments hinder the planned outcomes. If the team can't bear the responsibility of their autonomy properly, that would be a problem for the Scrum Master to tackle. The PO should entirely keep out of the work.

Since Sprint Reviews are the perfect opportunity to inspect and adapt both outcomes and progress, no status reporting should be required. A "gemba mindset" would indicate that if stakeholders are concerned about progress, they need to attend the Reviews, and should not rely on hearsay, that is, report documents. 

Team Organization

The Product Owner is not reponsible for how the team works, when they have meetings or who does what.

When Scrum is desired as a way of working, the team should have a Scrum Master. The worst thing a Product Owner can do with their time is bother with introducing, maintaining or optimizing Scrum - they should be able to rely on having proper Scrum in place.

Team events, such as Plannings or Reviews, help the team do their work, and as such, should be organized by the developers themselves, because only they know when and how they need these. The Scrum Master can support, and the Product Owner should attend - but the PO shouldn't be bothered with setting these up, and most definitely shouldn't run the entire show.

If anyone assigns tasks on a Scrum team, it's the team members self-organizing to do this. Having the Product Owner (or Scrum Master) do this job is an antipattern that will hurt the team's performance. The Product Owner should not even need to know who does what, or when.

Development Work

The Product Owner develops the product's position, not a technical solution. They have a team of experts to do this, and these experts (should) know better than the PO how to do this. That means the PO should be able to keep entirely out of design, implementation and testing.

Product Owners actively designing solutions often fall into the "premature optimization" trap, resulting in poor solutions. The best approach is to have the Product Owner collaborate with developers as needed to get sufficient clarity on how developers would proceed, but to focus fully on the "What" and keep entirely out of the "How."

When Product Owners have time for implementation, the product is most likely going to fail: while they're paying attention to the development, they aren't focusing on what's happening to the product and its customers out in the market.

Product Owners have a team of professionals around them who are supposed to deliver a high quality "Done" Increment. If their team has no quality assurance, the solution is to bring testers in, not to delegate testing to the Product Owner.

Continuous Integration Benchmark Metrics

 While Continuous Integration should be a professional software development standard by now, many organizations struggle to set it up in a way that actually works properly.

I've created a small infographic based on data taken from the CircleCI blog - to provide an overview of the key metrics you may want to control and some figures on how the numbers should look like when benchmarked against industry performance:

The underlying data is from 2019, as I could not find data from 2021.

Key Metrics

First things first - if you're successfully validating your build on every single changed line of code and it just takes a few seconds to get feedback, tracking the individual steps would be overkill. The metrics described in this article are intended to help you locate improvement potential when you're not there yet.

Build Frequency

Build frequency is concerned with how often you integrate code from your local environment. That's important because the assumption that your local version of the code is actually correct and consistent with the work of the remaining team is just that - an assumption, which becomes less and less feasible as time passes.

By committing and creating a verified, valid build, you reset the timer on that assumption, thereby reducing the risk of future failure and rework.

A good rule of thumb is to build at least daily per team member - the elite would validate their changes every couple of minutes! If you're not doing all of the following, you may have serious issues:

• Commit isolated changes
• Commit small changes
• Validate the build on every single change instead of bulking up

Build Time

The amount of time it takes for a committed change until the pipeline has successfully completed - indicating that the build is valid and ready for deployment into production.

Some organizations go insanely fast, with the top projects averaging at 2 seconds from commit all the way into production - and it seems to work for them. I have no insights whether there's much testing in the process - but hey, if their Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) on productive failures is also just a couple minutes, they have little to lose.

Well, let's talk about normal organizations - if you can go from Commit to Pass in about 3 and a half minutes, you're in the median range: half the organizations will still outperform you, half won't.

If you take longer than 28 minutes, you definitely have to improve - 95% of organizations can do better!

Build Failure Rate 

The percentage of committed changes causing a failure.

The specific root cause of the failure could be anything - from build verification, compilation errors or test automation - no matter what, I'm amazed to learn that 30% of projects seem to have their engineering practice and IDE tooling so well under control that they don't even have that problem at all, and that's great to hear. 

Well, if that's a problem for you like 1/5th of the time, you'd still pass as average, but if a third or more of your changes are causing problems, you should look to improve quickly and drastically!

Pipeline Restoration Time

How long it takes to fix a problem in the pipeline.

Okay, failure happens. Not to everyone (see above), but to most. And when it does, you have failure demand - work only required because something failed. The top 10% organizations can recover from such a failure within 10 minutes or less, so they don't sweat much when something goes awry. If you can recover within the hour, you're still on average.

From there, we quickly get into a hugely spread distribution - the median moves between 3 hours and 18 hours, and the bottom 5% take multiple days. The massive variation between 3 and 18 hours is explained easily - if you can't fix it before EOB, there's an entire night between issue and resolution.

Nightly builds, which were a pretty decent practice just a decade ago, would immediately throw you at or below median - not working between 6pm and 8am would automatically botch you above 12 hours, which puts you at the bottom already.

First-time Fix Rate

Assuming you do have problems in the pipeline - which many don't even have, you occasionally need to provide a fix to return your pipeline to Green condition.

If you do CI well, your only potential problem should be your latest commit, and if you follow the rules on build frequency properly, the worst case scenario is reverting your change, and if you're not certain that your fix will work, that's the best thing you can do in order to return to a valid build state.

Half the organizations seem to have this under control, while the bottom quartile still seems to enjoy a little bit of tinkering - with fixes being ineffective or leading to additional failures. 

If that's you, you have homework to do.

Deployment Frequency

The proof of the pudding: How often you successfully put an update into production.

Although Deployment Frequency is clearly located outside the core CI process, if you can't reliably and frequently deploy, you might have issues you maybe shouldn't have.

If you want to be great, aim for moving from valid build to installed build many times a day. If you're content with average, once a day is probably still fine. When you can't get at least one deployment a week, your deployment process is definitely ranking on the bottom of the barrel and you have definite room for improvement.

There are many root causes for lower deployment frequency, though: technical issues, organizational issues or just plain process issues. Depending on what they are, you're looking at an entirely different solution space: for example, improving technically won't help as long as your problem is an approval orgy with 17 different comittees.

Conclusion

Continuous Integration is much more than having a pipeline.

Doing it well means:

1.  Integrating multiple times a day, preferably multiple times an hour
2. Having such high quality that you can be pretty confident that there are no failures in the process, 
3. And even when a failure happens, you don't break a sweat when having to fix it

And finally, your builds should always be in a deployable condition - and the deployment itself should be so safe and effortless that you can do it multiple times a day.

Thousands of companies world-wide can do that already. What's stopping you?