Although my time as a product owner over the past year has been filled with ups and downs, it has been a fruitful year of learning and growing. There is no sure-win formula of how to become the perfect product owner. I am only here to share with you what I have experienced through my journey of gain and pain points, and perhaps reassure you that YOU TOO can make it.
A little background of my job; besides being a product owner, I am also the UX lead. The duality of these roles makes me the bridge connecting business, UX, and technology in my company.
The role of a product owner is quite demanding. It requires applying and adapting a wide range of skills spanning across a broad view of subject knowledge, excellent communications, and multi-tasking capabilities. However, what makes a great product owner is the extra step of taking full responsibility for maximizing the value of the product. You have to become the visionary who focuses on creating valuable products that can make a difference in the market.
Like all product owners, I have to fight through obstacles and balance myself between everyday problems, business issues, customer feedback, and time with my family. But I have made it a point to challenge myself to stay optimistic in my quest to become a better team player, father, son, and husband.
These six main attributes helped me overcome my challenges:
Communication
Communication is the key to success in any role. It is a product owner's job to be the facilitator of the product and keep stakeholders informed about the progress of projects, leading to plenty of meetings. Sometimes, it can feel like there are too many meetings. I get it. People get frustrated. There's a heated exchange of words. Everything feels like it's falling apart. This is really where excellent communication skills come in. I felt that keeping an open mind and giving clear directions helped keep even the most complicated things straight-forward and simple. I enjoyed continually doing a balancing act between teams, situations, and business to keep the momentum going and the team spirit alive. Remember, everyone is on the same boat. We want everything to work out. So try to have fun and keep it light and positive.
Problem Solving
My role as a product owner means I have to deal with many people with different problems from top to bottom. To stay optimistic amidst the tsunami of issues I have to deal with daily, I adopted a problem-solver mindset. Once I saw problems as opportunities to grow rather than a painful experience, it was easier to deal with the constant flow of issues and conflicts coming from all parties. On the one hand, I felt like a psychiatrist or social worker, because members of the team come to you with all kinds of problems. One the other hand, I also had to learn to face some of my questions by myself, because there are things no one can offer much assistance, or are willing to provide it with. Yet, these problems gave me ample opportunity to improve myself as both a leader and a teammate.
Focus on Goals
With the number of other projects and tasks I had to take on, it was easy to lose sight of the target goals. In our ever-changing world, the rules change every day. Although it was exciting and satisfying to play this ever-evolving game, it drained my brain. Now and then, I would take a step back to look at the big picture and refocus my efforts on the right things. It also helps to look at the customer feedback loop from time to time to get information about your product from real users. Identifying early adopters and getting their perspective will put everything in place in the big picture. Specific areas I thought were not good enough were great for the users, and what I thought was perfect, the users saw room for improvement. Even though the devil is in the details, some issues were really just storms...
Effective Decisions
Every day, we make tens of thousands of decisions. I cannot say I have made the best decisions, but I've learnt how to make things work. The first thing is to learn to say NO. It's impossible to make everyone happy, so I stopped aiming to do so. Another is to delegate and rely on others. I had to accept the fact that it is okay to be uncertain and not know all the answers. Teamwork allows each member to enhance and cover for another's strengths and weaknesses. The last thing is to stop trying to do everything at once. Each wall I hit over the past year had felt insurmountable, but they weren't impossible. Believe that what you have is enough and you can work with it. I purposefully slowed down to take small incremental steps with my team to chip away at each wall. It was tedious work, but it worked.
Maximise Value
In a way, you can say there is very little work-life balance as a product owner. How can the product be better? How do we stay ahead of the competition? How to deliver maximum value to customers? Questions like this fill my mind at every waking moment. You can't help but think about your product day and night, and sometimes through sleepless nights. But plain pondering is not productive. What works is evaluating the results Comparing and contrasting data against the target goals gives a clear image of where the product currently lies and how far it is away from the ideal. My team and I proceeded to work further based on the results to finetune or completely change the direction to improve, streamline, and generate better results.
Continuous Learning
A year ago, I often wondered how I was going to handle the sheer workload. My answer now is not to treat it as a job, but to integrate it into your life. This is still a work in progress for me, but I will treat it as a long-term project of constant learning. There are many things I am still learning, like trying not to do everything and delegate to the team. Trust me. If you decide to hoard all the work and do them all yourself, it will kill you.
Another critical thing is to let the actions speak louder than words; don't just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk too. Simply saying you are going to do something is not hard, putting it into actual practice takes perseverance, commitment, and determination. And I'm not just saying this for work. This is also the case for other areas of life, especially since I am also aiming to become a better father, son, and husband.
If there is one thing I want you to take away from all this, it's to end your day with gratitude. Especially with COVID-19 affecting everybody adversely, the best way to tackle its effects and any challenges in your way is to stay optimistic and work together.
Together we stand, but divided we fall!
#togetherisbetter #optimism #teamwork #productmanagement #productowner #gratitude