Coaching a New Product Owner
Recently, the Agile Mentors Community members shared their experiences around coaching new product owners, including their biggest challenges and how they overcame them. Prioritizing the product backlog
One of the biggest challenge in working with product owners is they don’t really know how to prioritize the backlog to maximize customer value. They know what they are told to do next by their boss or other internal stakeholders, but they don’t know how to question these requests or verify if they provide the greatest value to the customer.
An experienced AMC member shared how he spends a fair amount of time training product owners on how to effectively order the product backlog.
To begin with, he walks the product owners through several basic prioritization techniques, using only the size of the user stories to inform the order of the backlog. Then as the product owners grow comfortable with those methods, he slowly adds more information about each user story, such as rating (high, medium, low) and business value. The product owners quickly start to see how having more information can affect the outcome--even though the stories haven’t changed at all, the order varies greatly depending on how much information you acquire about each story.
The same member then shared a few different techniques for prioritization, which are described below. :
MoSCoW
The MosCoW method gives product owners a little more to think about when deciding about the priority of a request. The acronym stands for:
Must Have Should Have Could Have Won’t Have this time
20/20 Vision
20/20 Vision is an innovation game created by agile practitioners.
The theory behind this is that when you’re getting fitted for glasses, your optometrist will often ask you to compare two potential lenses by alternately showing each of them (“which of these lenses is better… number 1 or number 2?”).
You can use a variant of this approach to help your customers see which priorities are best for them, as customers often have trouble “seeing” which features are the highest priority, especially if you’re asking them to compare several features at the same time.
Kano
The Kano model was developed by Noriaki Kano in the 1970s and 1980s, while he was studying quality control and customer satisfaction. It challenges the conventional belief that improving every aspect of your product or service leads to increased customer satisfaction, asserting that improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort.
The Kano model is a simple two-axis grid, comparing product investment with customer satisfaction. The power of the Kano model comes in mapping your different features against this simple grid.
Pairwise Comparison
In pairwise comparison you start with a list of options, preferably between 5 and 12 options for best use of the tool. Each option is compared to every other option on the list and you vote for the one which is more important. The option with the most votes is the highest priority and so on. While using this method you are often forced to think critically of why one option is better than another option, driving sometimes surprising results. The value of the tool is not just in the results, but the critical thinking that execution of the tool drives.
Weighted Shortest Job First
Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a prioritization model used to sequence jobs to produce maximum economic benefit. In SAFe, WSJF is estimated as the Cost of Delay (CoD) divided by job size.
The theory behind it is that delays in work are expensive, so let’s figure out how to get the shortest job with the biggest return out the door first.
- Everything comes with a price
It’s common to encounter product owners who don’t know how to associate cost, size and effort with their requests—they just want everything!
Mike Cohn’s favorite response to the product owner who wants it all is to use the car analogy:
“I want to buy a car and I think a Ferrari would be a good choice. And then I go to the dealer and decide a Honda and a house or two would be better!”
This response usually makes product owners think twice before piling on more features.
One product owner in the AMC said he often encounters teams that want to build something that isn’t what the customer needs. For example, if the customer wants a Honda and a house, but the team wants to build a garage for a Ferrari first.
Another member challenged the garage request with, “Why would they ever need to build a garage first?”
The product owner responded, “Their argument is usually, ‘We need to do this so we can build a solid house around it.’”
As Rumplestiltskin said in every episode of Once Upon a Time, “”Remember deary, everything comes with a price.”
- The product owner who acts like a boss
An agile coach shared how a newly hired product owner, who seemed like a good fit for the team, frequently tried to dictate how things “should be” or how he would like them to be done.
The team was hoping a product owner training class would help get the product owner working more as a team member than a boss. Unfortunately, they soon found out it was going to take more than one class to change his mindset!
When the training failed to change the product owner’s bossy ways, the coach scheduled a short morning coffee/walk with the product owner every day for a “meeting of the minds.” During this time, the two talked from a leadership perspective about the health of the team.
The coach took a few notes throughout the day and had ideas on quick coaching pointers or topics where he wanted to get the product owner’s thoughts. This helped turn a lot of the “I statements” and “I decisions” into “Let’s run this by the team.”
Purposeful discussion, questions and feedback over time made a huge difference in coaching the new product owner.
The coach also learned a lot about patience and how important it is to practice in coaching. As much as we would all like to change behavior instantly, it doesn’t happen overnight—it takes time.
To learn more great coaching ideas (and a whole lot more), join the Agile Mentors Community. Visit www.agilementors.com for more information on membership.