Best Product Owner is User Who Know What They Need

In the most ideal case, a best software product is the one who programmer build for himself. Because in this case, the programmer is also the user. Product like this will deliver the best business value because the programmer will not bother to create anything that they do not need.

In the real life environment, I always hear complain from the team about their product owner. The team were expecting a product backlog with enough detail of user story and prioritize properly so they could start the conversation.

A really good product owner (PO) is some which I think should have the following skills

1. Able to decide what not to build

A lousy product owner copy features from their competitors, then a slightly better one interview the user to identify the priority. Good PO will then invent and add in some more features into the product backlog. However, a best PO will know what are essential and what are noise. For product owner to know what is essential, being a user of the product is not good enough. He/She would need to understand the goal of the user, or the real business value of each feature. Many users end up just use some feature because it is available and it's obvious, they never think of why they are doing such action. For example, a save button. What is the purpose of clicking on the save button? Can a system performing all the goals that a save button could do automatically? Such as auto save features.

2. Able to articulate business value to the programmers

It is important to let the programmer feel the same way the PO. So that they understand the business value that such features aim to deliver and then propose possible implementation method. Many PO do not bother to sell the features in the product backlog to the programmers, they are still mostly trapped in the traditional product manager mindset who believe a detail product specification is enough for the programmer to deliver the feature. As I explain above, the best software product is developed by the programmer for themselves, hence it is important to make the programmer think and act like the PO.

3. Able to understand Human Behavior

A good product design is a product that answer all the human desire. I will recommend all PO to read the book Evil by Design. All final users of the product are human and the more human friendly a product design is, the better chance it will become a good selling product. It will be good if the PO could educate their programmers to understand the same design philosophy.