Many companies misunderstand Product Ownership - or wose: Product Management - to be nothing more than managing the backlog of incoming demand. While that work surely needs to be done, it's the last thing that defines a successful Product Owner - "there's nothing quite as useless as doing efficiently that which shouldn't be done at all," which is what often happens when teams implement requests that are neither valuable, useful nor good for their product.
To build successful products, we need to continuously ask and answer the following questions:
Direction
1. What's the vision of our product, how close are we, and should we keep it? How does our product make our users' lives better? Where are we in the Product Lifecycle, and what does that mean for our product strategy? Do we have what it takes to take the next step?
Position
2. What does our product stand for, and what not? Will adding certain features strengthen or dilute our product? Are we clear on who's our target audience, who's not - and why? Do we want to expand, strengthen or shift our user base?
Discovery
3. What's the problem we'd like to solve? How big is this problem? Who has it? Is it worth solving? Which solution alternatives exist, is our product really the best way of solving it?
A weak Product Pillar leads to a weak product, which limits opportunities to make the product valuable and profitable - which quickly leads to a massive waste of time and money in product development, whereas a strong Product Pillar maximizes the impact of product development efforts.
Check your own team - on a scale from 1 to 10, how easily and clearly can you answer the questions above?
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