The product owner role is crucial, but can be challenging. What tooling is there to help? Can the tooling be made more effective, so that it becomes easier for product owners to be good product owners?

 

December 2019

 

The product owner plays a key role in the agile way of working. If it comes to guiding the development of a product, the product owner role is the most important one. For it is the product owner that determines what to do and where to go.

However, the product owner job is a challenging one. It can be hard to find a good product owner, for it is not easy to keep track of all different aspects of the task and do them well. (In case you like to read more about this, see a preceding article about the product owners role.)

For demanding jobs like this, correct tooling can make a big difference. Since the quality of the product owner is not only interesting for the person in question, but for the product development as a whole and the organization behind, I think it can be useful to have a closer look at the tooling for product owners.

 

Many existing tools …

Luckily, there are many tools that can support product owners. For each aspect of his responsibility there are tools:

• The product owner needs to have a vision on the product and is responsible for conveying that vision to the team. For this task there are tools like the product vision board (or business model canvas, product canvas, value proposition design etc.)
• The product owner is responsible for the stakeholder management. For this he can make use of stakeholder mapping, a stakeholder matrix etc.
• The product owner needs to understand the market and especially the end users with their pains and needs. For this he can use tools and ways of working like personas and journey mapping.
• Last but not least, the product owner is responsible for prioritizing the backlog, reflecting the points mentioned above. For this he can use a basic backlog, story mapping or tools like Azure Devops, Jira, Trello etc.

For all aspects of the job, there are tools. So there are plenty tools, you might think…

 

Existing tools support only parts of the job

There are many tools, but which tool helps to keep track of all the different tasks? Which tool binds all the different aspects, as they are listed above, together? Which tool helps to oversee all aspects of the responsibility, guiding prioritization and showing what actions to take?

There doesn’t seem to be such a tool. In the many years I work in the field, I haven’t seen a satisfying one yet. So I think that we still are in need of such a tool.

 

The product owner board

As a first step, we can simply combine the existing tools in one board. And it can be useful to add the product roadmap or milestones to which the organization has committed itself, in case such documents are used. If we put all this together, we get an extensive board. It may be big and clumsy, but at least it covers everything a product owner should pay attention to.

I call this board a product owner board. As an example, it can consist of the following components:

• Product vision board
• High over management planning
• Stakeholder matrix
• Prioritized personas
• Product description in terms of epics
• User story map as representation of the backlog

 

Obviously, there are many ways to assemble such a board. There is no format that fits all projects. Rather, the board can be tailored to the specific project situation.

In some cases just adding an add-in or two to Azure or Jira might already help to get the oversight needed. In other cases it can be helpful to create a large (Excel) sheet with everything in it. In other cases you might like to create a physical board in the project room. The crux is to combine all relevant information, from vision to backlog in one place, so no crucial aspects can be forgotten.

It is only a first step to simply aggregate everything relevant for product development. And - assuming that the work necessary for starting product development has been done - it need not be a challenging one. But it can already make a big difference.

 

Some advantages

As a product owner, it is helpful to have the relevant context of the project at hand. For it helps to be reminded yourself and it makes prioritization easier. And if team members are fully aware, their ideas and proposals are more likely to be attuned to the vision and therefore helpful for the product owner. This can lead to better ideas and to a positive vibe in the team. For team members like to be valued for their contributions by the product owner.

In case a stakeholder complains about the prioritization, it helps to be able to show the product vision and maybe the high over road map describing main goals and functionalities of the first product version. Sometimes, you don’t even need to justify your prioritization. The board tells the story for you!

In this form, a product owner board can already be very useful. But we can take it a step further.

 

Smart indicators

This second step is to enrich the information with ‘smart indicators’. A smart indicator can be as simple as coloring a stakeholder name in the stakeholder matrix. Using the colors green, orange and red to reflect the status of the information normally works well.

To give an example, an influential stakeholder that disturbs the development rather than supporting it, can be colored red. By doing that, it stands out, making it harder to forget that some action is needed, like for instance contacting this stakeholder to smooth things up.

Another example. Suppose that the product owner and the team have a nice set of persona's (correctly characterizing the target groups). And suppose that the stakeholders who decide if the project will have a second phase are not aware of these persona's at all. Then I suggest to make the persona’s orange on the board (or even red). I do so because those who decide over the budget should agree on which group is the target group and has the priority. If influential stakeholders aren’t aligned, friction may occur and that might have serious consequences for the project.

As you can imagine, smart indicators can be used in any component of the board. And their colors can be given the meaning that is most useful for that component.

 

This is helpful, but the board isn’t coloring the items by itself. So the question is: how do you know when to color an item on the board?

The expertise needed is the experience and knowledge of the agile process. A scrum master or agile coach should have that knowledge and make the time to help the product owner out. But sometimes, the scrum master is overloaded, or the product owner may be inexperienced and in need of lots of support. In such cases, a specific product owner coach can be a good option as well.

 

A product owner board doubles as an (agile) project quality scan

It can be confronting to create a product owner board, for you need to reflect on all aspects of the product development. Especially if, in a running project, not all the necessary work was done, many issues can become uncovered. While creating the board, you may discover that the vision is lacking, that it isn’t really clear who the target users are or that there is no formal agreement on budgeting, etc.

In cases like this, the product owner board may turn largely red and it is important to work on these fundamental issues first. Obviously that can be a challenge when the organization is not really open to change or improve the project organization. In such a case, more may be needed to bring the situation forward. Help from an agile coach or product owner coach that helps the organization to be more transparent and agile, can be indispensable.

Either case, experience shows that updating the product owner board also leads to checking project quality, creating the insights that help to minimize risks and improve quality.

 

If the agile project is organized well, the red indicators are not all over the place. Then again a product owner board shows where to focus on, but the situation is easier because the preconditions for running a successful project are (more or less) met. Then it is a tool that helps to decide what to do in daily product owner matters like for instance prioritizing user stories and distributing time across stakeholders.

Since the product owner board contains all relevant information and indicates where action is needed, it is really helpful. But to get the most out of it, the board should be up to date and shared with management, team and stakeholders. If there is a lot of resistance to share it, this is an indication that the agility of the organization can be improved. Also in this way, the board uncovers potential quality issues.

 

Conclusion

As an aggregation of everything relevant for developing a successful product, a product owner board supports the agile process. It helps the product owner and the stakeholders (including the higher management) to stay focused and to understand and optimize the product development.

When the board is enriched with smart indicators, it also contains a lot of actual project status information. And that is not all. It can also contain an serious amount of project experience, for than it also contains the ‘wisdom’ concerning which situations to act upon.

It can require some custom work or coaching to create and use a board that really matches the specific project situation and therefore helps the project the most. But once in place and up to date, such a board helps with much more than prioritizing user stories. It also helps to maintain and convey the vision, represent customers, manage stakeholders, mitigate risks etc. In short, it helps to be a good product owner!

For more information about the product owner role, the product owner board or product owner coaching, please feel free to contact the author.

 

Frans van der Veen

 

This article is written by Frans van der Veen and parts of it were originally posted on LinkedIn in December 2019.

 

Do you want to know how I can help you as a product owner? Check out "Coaching op maat voor product owners" (Dutch).