Product Owners Need to Listen More and Talk Less
First, you should strive to understand, then to be understood.
First, you should strive to understand, then to be understood.
Communication is a vital skill for Product Owners, and yet it’s vastly misunderstood. One thing is talking to people, but understanding them is an entirely different one. Until you can ensure common understanding, confusion is awaiting you. From my experience, most of my failures boil down to miscommunication.
If you want to lead teams to deliver value, sharpening your communication skills is crucial.
Why is it so hard to communicate well? The reason is simple; verbal communication represents less than half of the message, the rest lies in body language. That’s why understanding non-verbal communication is critical. But wait, how do we do that in our virtual world?
Our current scenario makes communication way more challenging than it used to be. Exchanges in front of a 24" screen aren’t as natural as in person. Therefore, active listening can be handy for us and help us ensure shared understanding.
Let me share with you how you can put active listening into practice in your daily business. Hopefully, you can benefit from what I’ve experienced so far.
First, You Should Understand Than Be Understood
Understanding others is a difficult job. We often assume we understand, but actually, we don’t. It’s easier for us to give answers than questions. The issue is that a question opens a conversation while an answer shuts it down.
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Let me give you an example. We were scaling our marketplace up. To bring more sellers, we needed to offer standard interfaces; otherwise, we would face resistance from the market. During a refinement session, I shared with the team this need, and the conversation went like this:
Developer: “Our platform needs a massive refactor to support new interfaces.”
Me: “Why do you say that?”
Developer: “We built the whole platform to support only XML integration. When we started, nobody told us about being flexible. It will be challenging to make our interfaces flexible.”
Me: “Is there anything we could do to adapt our current platform to support at least APIs integration? For now, we want to validate whether a new interface will help us or not, and a massive refactor scares me.”
Developer: “If you want to create more technical debt. Then, yes, we can always make the poor architecture even worse. But I can’t promise scalability.”
This refinement session resulted in confusion and frustration. If you analyze this conversation, what was the problem? Assumptions.
New interfaces: The developer understood we would have to support multiple data exchange formats when I said new interfaces. Yet, he didn’t ask.
Massive work: when I heard the word “massive,” I thought about months of work, and later I got to know he meant “massive” change in small part of the system, but it wouldn’t be more than a week.
Assuming understandings is the perfect way of creating confusion.
No worries, there’s a simple way to avoid this trap. And it’s called active listening.
How to Put Active Listening Into Practice
Let’s start by understanding what active listening is.
Active listening means you listen carefully and ensure understanding by rephrasing the other side in your own words. This simple pattern provides clarity during your conversations.
“When you practice active listening, you make the other person feel heard and valued. In this way, active listening is the foundation for any successful conversation.”
When I first heard about active listening, I didn’t connect with the benefits of it. I thought it would slow down my exchanges with customers, stakeholders, and developers, and in the end, it wouldn’t bring a valuable improvement. Well, I was utterly wrong. Due to active listening, I could avoid endless misunderstandings. It may seem silly to rephrase the others, but that’s not the point. The point is to ensure both sides share the same understanding.
Here is how I use active listening as a Product Owner:
Clarification: whenever I notice a word that can lead to multiple interpretations, I ask for clarification, e.g., simple, complex, challenging.
Paraphrase: to ensure shared understanding. I rephrase what the other said with my own words. When the other side says, “Yes, that’s what I meant,” this gives me the confidence I understood.
Circular questions: when I listen to something unexpected, I try to imagine myself in the other person’s situation, and I share that. This approach helps the other side reflects and provides you more details, which leads to better understanding.
Summarize: I found it helpful to share the key points of the conversation and my understanding at the end of it. The goal is to ensure both sides share the same worldview.
Now let’s go back to the example I gave and explore how active listening would have led the conversation to a different outcome.
Me: “To scale up, we will need to provide new interfaces for our sellers. We should offer what is standard among our competitors.”
Developer: “The need is clear to me, but could you help me understand what you mean by new interfaces?”
Me: “Initially, I believe we should offer a self-service interface, which means that a new seller can do everything on her own. We could start with a standard API.”
Developer: “I got you. But that will lead to massive refactoring. Our current structure only supports XML.”
Me: “I see. Could you tell me what you mean by massive in terms of effort?”
Developer: “Well, it’s hard to estimate, but in general, we would need to have a generic abstraction layer. And then we could plug in new interfaces. If I could dedicate one or two weeks for that, I am convinced I can find a solution.”
Me: “That sounds promising. You mean that in a maximum of two weeks of work, you could prepare the foundations to allow new interfaces, and then we can start creating the API. Did I get you correct?”
Developer: “More or less. During the time I mentioned, I would start testing with the API already so that we could be even faster.”
Me: “Great! Let’s go for that.”
As you can see, active listening would help me find common ground and help the team solve the challenge we had.
Curiosity and Empathy Yield Great Conversations
Our mission as Product Owners is to make the lives of our customers better while generating value for the business. It’s a tough job, but we can succeed once we master the art of conversation. For that, curiosity and empathy are vital for us.
Once you can precisely understand people around you, delivering value becomes easier than you imagine.
Here is what has helped me avoid confusion and ensure clarity:
Ask more questions instead of providing more answers
Ensure understanding by rephrasing the others with your own words
Strive first to understand, then to be understood
Empathize by putting yourself into the other’s situation
“Communication — the human connection — is the key to personal and career success.”— Paul J. Meyer
