 An Introduction to Driven Product Ownership Good product owners know how best to use agile tools and artifacts. Great product owners are driven to develop their subtle, softer skills. The product owner job is probably the most demanding role on an agile team, certainly in terms of responsibilities and daily duties. And the number one difficulty that product owners tell me they have is that they don't have enough hours in the day to be an effective agile product manager. Throughout this course, we're going to look at ways that you can work towards becoming a great product owner in order to be successful in a world where customer needs and technology and market conditions continue to change really, really rapidly. Get ready to get driven because through my work with hundreds of product owners and product managers I've identified some key characteristics that separate the top product owners from the rest. And in this course, you're going to learn how to be a great product owner. So I'm going to teach you how you can become more decisive because you're going to learn how to make decisions with incomplete information and allow other people to make decisions as well. You're going to learn to be more ruthless. You're going to develop a relentless drive to maximize value and minimize risk while staying focused on the big vision. You're going to become more informed. You're going to develop your appetite to know the most that you possibly can about your product's domain and the people you're working with while being prepared to act with incomplete information. You're going to become more versatile. You're going to become more comfortable responding to changing circumstances both in terms of your product development techniques, but also your personal leadership style. Empowering. You're going to create a sense of shared ownership amongst all of the stakeholders and bring people along with you on your product journey. And negotiable. You're going to have faith in your vision while also being open to feedback and change. In this course, I'm going to explain the importance of each of these attributes and how you can develop yourself to be not just a good product owner, but a great one. If any of you have read my book or taken my course Scrum Mastery, then you'll already be familiar with my approach of describing the differences between what good behavior is and what great behavior is. As a coach, I like to focus on the positives in my books, in my courses, in my general work. And that's mainly because I've met very, very few people who act with the intention of deliberately messing things up. And it fits with the spirit of the Agile Manifesto as well, because that describes valuing certain behaviors over others, not instead of. Great product owners embrace unpredictability, in part by being decisive. They know the importance of moving forward in spite of any perfectionist tendencies, but they also recognize the power of delaying decisions until the last responsible moment. So because of this, they gather as much data as possible, while simultaneously reducing the cost of wrong decisions. They're also humble enough to involve other people in the decision-making process to improve the quality and the timeliness of those decisions to increase engagement and also to allow them to focus their time on the most important issues. Being decisive is one of many areas where a product owner needs to be ruthless at times. In order to build a great product, great product owners prioritize ruthlessly. It's often impossible to deliver everything, and it's certainly impossible to deliver everything all at once, so great product owners work tirelessly to target their efforts on the absolutely critical areas. If they're going to do this successfully, you often have to battle your tendencies to want to please other people and instead focus on what's best for the product. Great product owners are prepared to take calculated gambles in uncertain environments, but they're also always prepared to be ruthless about cutting their losses if the empirical data they're collecting indicates that the return on the investment simply isn't there. And that's not easy because that will involve disappointing stakeholders or letting go of your own ideas. But thinking strategically and objectively while practicing a little bit of mindfulness can make this side of the role a little bit easier, and we'll look at that. The empirical data that product owners are collecting through an iterative incremental development process like Scrum will also help them become more informed, and when you're more informed, you're more effective. As well as gathering as much information as possible by researching the market and the users and the technology and the product space, great product owners realize they most likely will have to act with incomplete information, and because of that, some degree of uncertainty. Great product owners also work at becoming informed about themselves, their cognitive biases, where they have gaps in their understanding. They know that as well as being able to answer the team's questions, they've got to be willing to tap the collective knowledge of the team by asking curious, humble, illuminative, limitless, and direct questions, and we'll go through each of these later on. Knowing when to answer questions and when to ask questions is a good example of a driven product owner being versatile. There's a lot to be said for a product owner providing clarity and stability to a team that's operating in an environment of uncertainty and change, but the best product owners never let their reliability become rigidity. They adapt their leadership style based on the circumstances, building rapport with the team and stakeholders while maintaining the necessary professionalism to have really crucial conversations when it's necessary. Great product owners are also naturally versatile when it comes to the product. They're able to create and articulate a clear and compelling vision for the product and then stay true to that vision for as long as it holds up, because they'll also be rigorous in fine-tuning that vision when new information comes to light during the empirical product development process. The product owner is expected to be the owner of the vision for the product and to generate enthusiasm and support and buy-in for that vision, then manage the product backlog and the stakeholders in order to maximize the return on investment while delivering that product. Because of that, they're expected to provide a really clear leadership role but that doesn't always have to be leading from the front. Great product owners are empowering. They strive to involve and engage the development team. They work with them as collaborative partners rather than a supplier. They get past any fears they might have about trust by hiring well, supporting individual and team development and developing a respectful and open relationship with the team. While working with the development team, great product owners also create and involve strategies that empower and motivate the development team to be proactive, creative and innovative. For example, by giving them problems to solve or telling them stories that they can create rather than specific requirements to implement. Finally, all great product owners know they need to be negotiable in order to be successful. It's rare that it's possible to please everyone and still create the best possible product. So we're going to have to be able to negotiate amongst all of the stakeholders for the good of the product. Great product owners remember that the delivered product won't be perfect either. So they negotiate the features, focusing on the next perfect slice of the product that we're going to deliver incrementally. Iterative incremental product development will inevitably involve mistakes. Great product owners negotiate risk by avoiding bad mistakes while also tackling their inner perfectionist by embracing the power of making good mistakes early or maximising learning as it might better be known. Being an agile product owner is a tough job but it's a highly rewarding one. There are loads of tools and artefacts available to make the practical side of the job slightly easier but no matter what product or service we're building the process is inevitably going to involve people. Therefore, the biggest difference between the good product owners and the great product owners is how much they've grasped the subtler, softer, more people-focused characteristics required to master the role. This course will inspire you to become a more driven product owner.