The 3 Stressful Trade-Offs Product Owners Have to Handle to Thrive
How to make decisions that maximize the odds of being successful.
How to make decisions that maximize the odds of being successful.
It’s impossible to please everyone as a Product Owner. Every day you will need to make trade-offs, which will generate discomfort with some people. Making trade-offs is stressful; conflicts are inevitable. Some examples are:
You want to validate the assumptions as soon as possible, but developers want to avoid technical debt, and UX Designers want an amazing experience.
How can your decisions result in better outcomes? Do you search for data to back your choices up, or do you trust your gut feelings?
Customers have pain points that may not help you achieve business goals, yet they might leave you because your solution frustrates them. Should you focus on the customers’ problems or business goals?
How could you make trade-offs to maximize the odds of success? Let me share some ideas with you. Hopefully, you can use them and transform trade-offs into an easy task as a Product Owner.
1. Good Enough vs. Delightful Experience
As a Product Owner, you want to ensure you are leading the team in the right direction. The goal is to focus on a problem worth solving. Once you find a worthwhile problem to solve, the possibilities of potential solutions are endless. That’s why you need to make many decisions, and most probably, no decision will please everyone.
A common challenge is, what do we need to do to validate our assumptions? Different perceptions will make such decisions more complicated. For example:
UX Designers will push for a delightful solution because they want to ensure the best experience possible.
Developers may push for a sustainable and scalable code because they don’t want to create technical debt.
The Product Owner wants a pragmatic approach to avoid wasting the team's time.
Each side will have convincing arguments for each approach, but you cannot do everything. The solution cannot be pragmatic and delightful at the same time. It’s daunting to make such trade-offs; conflicts are ahead of you.
The trade-off depends on your scenario. Let me share my approach:
If you are entering a highly competitive market, you need to have a minimum experience level as your competitors. The customers don’t accept less than that. For example: don’t try to compete against Instagram with a crap solution.
If you have validated your assumptions, and you know there’s a promising market. The solution should be prepared to scale.
If you’ve found an unexplored market, uncertainties are all over the place. A pragmatic approach works better because it will help you learn as fast as possible about your end-users. Done is better than perfect.
I think building a product is like being an artist. You need to keep evolving, step by step. If you hide your art from your audience, you lose momentum. Every day is a chance to learn something. Don’t throw this chance away.
Ship and don’t look back
When you ship, momentum happens. You evolve.
Your creative processes gets better.
If you aspire to be a great writer, just start writing.
You can’t be an amazing artist if you don’t enjoy the intense process of sharing your work with the rest of us.
— Thomas Oppong, Make Life Easier on Yourself by Accepting “Good Enough.” Don’t Pursue Perfection, Pursue Progress
2. Decisions Based on Data vs. Gut Feelings
How fast can you make decisions? Do you need data to back up your decisions? Can you trust your guts? Product Owners have tons of decisions to make every single day. Sometimes you have data, but most of the time, you don’t.
“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
― Peter F. Drucker
Let’s have a look at some well-known decisions for Product Owners:
What is the Product Vision?
Which problems are worth solving?
Which features should you remove from the product?
Should you pivot the solution or insist on it?
What should be the next Sprint Goal?
These are only some examples of questions you have to answer as a Product Owner. How do could you handle it? It doesn’t matter if you have data or not; you have to make the call.
My opinion is simple; a bad decision is better than no decision. If your decision is bad, you will learn something at least. But if you don’t make any decision, you don’t learn anything.
“If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.” — Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon
3. Customer Problem vs. Business Goals
A performance killer for Scrum Teams is the inability to focus. Interruptions lead developers to costly context switches, which results in a dramatic productivity issue.
Product Owners face a dilemma: Customer Problems vs. Business Goals. Sometimes they might be conflicting. For example, stakeholders want to focus on the growth rate, while customers never return after the first purchase because they are frustrated.
What should you do as a Product Owner? If you focus on the customer problems, stakeholders will be initially dissatisfied, but customers will stay. And if you focus on business goals, stakeholders might be initially satisfied, but the growth is unsustainable.
In my opinion, Product Owners should strive to solve the end-users’ problems. A business without loyal customers is not a business at all. Product Owners should be brave and do what has to be done, even if it means ignoring the business goals.
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
— Sam Walton
Wrap-up
Fear of failure is what blocks many people from innovating. If you are a Product Owner, fear shouldn’t stop you from trying something new. Your only fear should be: ending a day without any learning.
The faster you learn as a Product Owner, the quicker you can achieve your mission. You’ve got to make trade-offs, sometimes you will make bad choices, yet you will learn something from them. To succeed, you should always be on the move, don’t let yourself rot in the comfort zone.
“One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.” — Henry Ford
Do you want to write for Serious Scrum or seriously discuss Scrum?