The 7 Books Product Owners Should Read to Create a Value-Driven Mindset
Without understanding what value is, Product Owners will lead Scrum Teams in pointless directions.
Without understanding what value is, Product Owners will lead Scrum Teams in pointless directions.
The biggest flaw of most Product Owners is the misunderstanding of value. A faulty perception of value will lead Scrum Teams in the wrong direction, which results in pointless solutions.
Have you ever been in a situation that no matter how hard you work, it’s never enough to match the expectations? Such a situation is a sign that you are working on the wrong thing.
Unfortunately, many people underestimate the complexity of being a Product Owner. What I am about to say may not please everyone, but getting a PSPO or a CSPO certificate doesn’t mean you are ready to be a Product Owner. You cannot acquire all the knowledge you need in a two-day training. I am not saying such certificates are useless, but they are just the beginning.
Successful Product Owners understand that Scrum is a means to an end. It’s never about doing better Scrum; it’s all about delivering value for the end-user and business.
Scrum doesn’t ensure that what you’re doing is valuable and that’s by design. It’s a purposefully incomplete process framework after all. Value depends on your context.
— Maarten Dalmijn, Doing perfect Scrum doesn’t mean you are delivering value
It’s challenging to thrive as a Product Owner. It will take you years to learn what it takes to become a robust Product Owner. From my experience, the mindset is the most critical part. That’s why I’d like to give you some food for thoughts.
Over the last years, I’ve read hundreds of books. I consider some of them vital for Product Owners. Let me share with you seven books you should read to develop a value-driven mindset.
1. Empowered, by Marty Cagan
“In strong product companies, teams are given problems to solve rather than features to build. And most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. “ — Marty Cagan, Empowered
Marty Cagan is a reference in the Product Management world. I consider his latest book, Empowered, to be a must-read for any product person. After reading it, you will have a clear picture of what differentiates excellent product companies from the rest.
Although this book focuses on the leadership, anyone who works with Product Management will benefit a lot from it. For me, this book was revealing. After reading it, I got a clear picture of what it takes to deliver successful products.
2. This Is Marketing, by Seth Godin
“Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See
I have noticed that many Product Owners are clueless about marketing. Many people perceive marketing as a way of increasing sales. This perception is wrong. Marketing is more than that; it’s about understanding your audience and serving them the best way possible.
To build a successful product, you need to find a minimum viable audience. For me, this was the key learning from this book. Often, Product Owners focus on the minimum viable product while ignoring the audience. No business can survive without a minimum viable audience.
3. Testing Business Idea, by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder
“Inventing new business models requires experimentation and openness to the idea of being wrong.” — David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder
Validating assumptions is an essential element to build meaningful products. Nobody knows whether the solution is meaningful until the end-user says so. The secret is to find effective ways of testing business ideas as fast as possible. The faster, the better.
In the book Testing Business Ideas, David Bland gives numerous ways of validating ideas. After reading this book, you will have a vast repertoire of testing techniques. You will recognize which technique fits your scenario better in terms of cost, effort, and time.
4. The Invincible Company, by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Fred Etiemble, and Alan Smith
“Avoid big failures, or you’re dead.
Embrace small failures, or you’re dead.”
— Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Fred Etiemble and Alan Smith
The only certainty in the business world is change. What is relevant today might not be relevant tomorrow. Yet, a few companies have reinvented their business models over decades, e.g., Apple and Microsoft. One of the critical elements of the invincible companies is how they deal with failures.
It’s impossible to innovate without failures. Still, companies have a choice of how big of a risk they’re willing to take. The invincible company chooses to fail small; the goal is to generate learnings. They fail often, but they adapt faster.
Great companies avoid significant failures; they embrace learning. Yet, they accept failure as a part of any successful journey.
5. Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman
“The fine art of relationships — requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy.”
― Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
I’ve heard many people saying, “Until you empathize with the end-users, you cannot provide solutions for their problems.” I agree with this statement, but do people know what empathy is?
Emotional intelligence is essential for Product Owners. You do need to empathize with many people beyond the end-user. But first, you have to understand what empathy means.
Daniel Goleman clarified the importance of emotional intelligence in this book. I believe this book is a must-read for everyone. Too often, we focus on the hard skills while ignoring the soft ones. We cannot underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence.
6. Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen
“New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.”
― Clayton M. Christensen
When companies try to push products to their customers instead of enabling customers to overcome obstacles, luck is the key factor for success. As a Product Owner, you cannot depend on luck; you need to have a framework that increases the chance of thriving.
The book Competing Against Luck has a useful three-step approach for building successful products:
Find a job that needs to be done: you should understand the jobs your customers want done. The secret is to think as a psychologist instead of an entrepreneur. You want to understand why the customer wants the job done.
Document the journey, think from the customer perspective, create a storyboard that shows where, when, and what customers do when they want the job done. You want to find obstacles and frustrations; these are your opportunities.
Remove the obstacle and remedy the frustrations: create a new experience twice as good as the current one. The experience has to delight the customers because new is always scary, people tend to resist changes.
It won’t be easy to implement these three-step process, but if you depend on luck, well, good luck :)
7. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
“Each design is a proposed business solution — a hypothesis. Your goal is to validate the proposed solution as efficiently as possible by using customer feedback.”
― Jeff Gothelf, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
Products are made for the end-users, not for the Scrum Team. In the past, people could tolerate bad User Experience, but nowadays, this is not acceptable. That’s why Product Owners have to understand the importance of User Experience.
This book is not theoretical; it’s a practical guide for swiftly experimenting with design ideas, validating them with real users, and continually adjusting your design based on what you learn. The critical aspect is to embrace learning and accept that the product is built for the user.
Final Thoughts
Digital Product Management is continuously evolving. To remain relevant as a Product Owner, you cannot live in a comfort zone. More frequently than ever, new techniques emerge. To excel in your career, curiosity has to be your fuel.
Books represent only one of the multiple sources of knowledge. Learning has never been so easy; you have possibilities for all tastes. Everyone has a different way of learning; you should find your style and never let yourself rot in a comfort zone.
To remain successful, you need to be open to the new. What works today might not work tomorrow. Embrace change and rock as a Product Owner.
(Note: The links mentioned in this article are affiliate links. If you choose to purchase these books through these links, it will help me earn a small amount of money — at no extra cost to you. Thanks!)
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