Valery: There are always two models: if your customer is a large company, then the investor himself wouldn’t be the Product Owner, it will be one of the company’s employees who works in this direction and knows the domain and processes well. If we are referring to small projects, most likely the company will not have the resources to hire an individual employee. They will want to save money, so they will allocate someone from the company’s leaders, for example, the head of the department or the original idea owner.
What are the requirements for a Product Owner?- First, understand how the methodology works.
- Second, understand the market in which the product is launched to prioritize requirements in order to maximize product value.
- Third, understand the finances and metrics to measure the team’s performance and the efficiency of product implementation.
Large corporations often ask the contractor to hire a Product Owner, but this creates a problem: the customer’s monitoring tool will be constricted, and the involvement will be lower. I try to keep the Product Owner on the customer’s side: they should be as involved as possible in the product creation process. The customer knows the domain area and understands the market’s needs.
If a customer brings the product owner with the competency and skill, yet they don’t understand Scrum. You’ll need to dedicate time onboarding, building relationships and learning. Once the training period has successfully passed, then you can get a team that will launch mind blowing products for the target customer. This approach is more effective, because the customer’s involvement will trigger creative ideas and unique solutions from the technical side, essentially creating product development synergy.
Let’s talk about pivoting in the product development process. How do you know when it’s time to pivot?A product reversal is a change in direction and often needed when more information about the consumer or market is needed. Then we continuously create product elements and show them to consumers on the market (or to a limited circle of consumers) to gather feedback. After that, we receive new information, paying attention to market signals and changing situations , and we make a decision to turn in one direction. Agile is based on the principles that pivoting is a continuous practice, it is tied to retrospectives and the analysis of the result obtained: you can go to a conference and get inspired, get new insights, product analytics and decide on a reversal.
Sometimes by this definition we mean something large-scale, but in fact, decisions are made at the team level. This is a question of the product scale: the smaller it is, the fewer the number of people who make decisions based on the new data. In addition to external factors, such as changes in the market, there are also internal ones, when you are inspired by something and want to slightly change your format. The third factor is consumers: they provide feedback on the basis of which conclusions and decisions need to be made. Can you conceptually change a product’s business model quickly? This, again, depends on the scale of the product. In any case, if you move in development with small iterations, then with the same small iterations you do a pivot. Agile is a continuous work with incoming data from consumers, external market factors and the team.
What is a Product Roadmap based on? What should I pay attention to when drawing a roadmap?