This week at Mile High Agile I had the honor to lead an open space session about how Product Managers and Product Owners can work better together. It was a great session, with about 40 attendees, so I want to share what we discussed with you. Hopefully you’ll find it useful for either thinking about having both Product Managers and Product Owners or helping a new PM or PO explore how they can work with their peers. Or you may even want to use this format to run your own open space session.
I start my open space sessions by asking folks what they want to get from the session as they mill in. This greatly helps me set a flow and tone for the session. The first goal that folks had for this one was learning more about the alphabet soup of PMs, PMs, POs, and BAs. I took the first stab for the group, defining each and setting the framework with the venn diagram of usable/feasible/viable solutions. When I’m working with a PM or PO, I see the PO taking the central intersection of the three circles, while the Product Manager focuses on viability. The Product Manager does vital tasks such as market analysis, customer segmentation, and competitive research to discover customer problems that they are willing to pay money to solve. The Product Owner works with the Team to create the solutions that meet the customer problems that the Product Manager has identified. This framework resonated with a lot of the audience, and some other suggestions were to think of Product Managers as outwards facing and the Product Owner as inwards facing, or the two on a scale from Product Manager strategic thinking to Product Owner tactical thinking.
I then had folks who work as both PMs with POs to rate their experience with fist-to-five voting. Giving a 5 means you wouldn’t have it any other way, and a 1 means your experience has been horrendous. Most people were a 3 or 4 on their experiences, and I had folks go around to discuss why. The main theme by far is that it’s all about communication. Having great communication between the PM and PO is critical and gets a 5 while poor communication and understanding of responsibilities leads to a 3. Thus we shared ways to improve that communication:
- Take time to get to know each other. Get beers, go for walks, and lunch together.
- Share ideas, both the good and the bad. Share a lot so you both get in the practice of giving constructive criticism and improve each others’ ideas.
- Make a regularly scheduled time to talk. Save the space so you always have a venue to share ideas and feedback so that you don’t have to schedule a meeting when there’s an issue.
- Set roles and responsibilities. Be sure that you’ve got each others backs, but also are sharing effectively. You could talk through one of the frameworks above to make sure it works for both of you. You also consider using a RACI matrix to structure and document your agreement.
- Learn each others values and strengths. My favorite is to use StrengthsFinder to not only learn about yourself but also about your product partner. Many other personality assessments like Myers-Briggs, work great too.
- Make sure your development Team gets access to customer interactions and research from the Product Manager. Having a sense of purpose is essential to being motivated at work, and this can get lost without great communication. Hearing about the impact of a Team’s deliverables in the market is the most important of all.
Overall, folks liked having Product Managers & Product Owners to get two minds on the challenges of great product management and ownership. They can divide the many demands of product leadership to ensure amazing successes in knowing customer problems and creating solutions. The challenges come from poor communication, such as not sharing product results or leveraging technical innovations to guide customer research. Hopefully by using some of the tips we generated above you’ll be able to ensure your own success, and if you have questions or your own tips, please leave them in the comments!