A Product Owner Experience

Transitioning to a product owner role after 15+ years as a developer, I found that my old-school views on product lifecycle and limited agile scrum experience initially hindered my effectiveness. Key to becoming a successful PO in a monolithic software product are: maintaining strong relationships between backlog producers (PMs, Support Managers, Internal QAs) and consumers (developers, architects, UX), ensuring clear communication among all stakeholders, and organizing proper schedules, especially for preplanning events. These strategies have helped me bridge the gap between product management and engineering, ensuring a well-maintained and efficient backlog

7/3/20242 min read

Introduction

I became a product owner after almost 15+ years of developer experience, but it did not help me to be a good PO. This was due to my old-school thoughts about the product lifecycle and limited experience in agile scrum. I always thought that it dragged developers' feet and added more time to develop any feature. Most likely, I had the wrong people on my side who taught me what agile or scrum was. Of course, when I was a developer, I attended many sessions about agile processes.

Let me come to the point: what are the most important points to be the best PO in a monolithic software product? In my later series, I will explain the difference between monolithic PO vs. Modular PO. Here I am going to share important points from my experience.

Better Relationships

As a PO, we may talk to various people in our organization, but we should care more about two types of people: one is the backlog producer, and the other is the backlog consumer. If you imagine a backlog as a pipe, then on one end of the pipe, you need a backlog producer, and on the other end, you need a backlog consumer.

In various organizations, backlog producers and backlog consumers are different sets of people. For example, in my organization, PMs, Support Managers, and Internal QAs are considered backlog producers. On the other hand, development managers, architects, developers, and UX are considered backlog consumers. So at any given point in time, I want to maintain a better relationship between backlog producers and backlog consumers to make sure my pipe is flowing perfectly.

Good Communication

Everywhere in the corporate world, you always hear that we need to have good communication skills. I acknowledge the same here, but I just want to emphasize that you have to maintain good communication among all your stakeholders and engineering teams.

In my organization, we have several PMs who are facing the customer side, so I am the only PO who bridges the gap between product management and product engineering for most of my engineering team's backlog. Therefore, I need help from development managers or developers who execute the backlog at regular intervals and PMs and support managers who can help to maintain a healthy backlog. When you combine better relationships with good communication, you don't need to worry about some parts of these functions from your PO activities.

Proper Schedules

In any organization, or for that matter, any people in an organization should maintain proper schedules to organize their tasks. Of course, this is even applicable to POs. But how should we maintain proper schedules? As a PO, you are responsible for all agile events.

If you ask me, we reduced and modified the format of events to suit our organization. Of course, it might be a bigger topic for why we modified the format of events, and I will cover this topic in my future articles. Let me come to the point: we have only one event, called preplanning. In our preplanning event, we do backlog review and plan for upcoming sprints. So technically, I am responsible for only one event to go over the backlog with the scrum master or development managers.

Conclusion