Be A Good Product Owner, Say No To Things

This resource first appeared in issue #56 on 08 Jan 2021 and has tags Strategy: Product/Service Management, Technical Leadership: Other

The 10 Attitudes of Outstanding Product Owners - David Pereira
Tactfully rejecting feature requests - Andrew Quan

Because of the funding structure of research our training has taught us to think in terms of projects, but in research computing we’re mainly managing products - long lived things that other people use, and don’t typically have clear start or end dates.

That means thinking in terms of differentiation, strategy, speeding the learning process, priorities, and alignment, rather than or at least in addition to thinking of deadlines, roadmap/gantt charts, and execution.

Pereira’s article is a good crash course into that line of thinking. Quan’s emphasizes one particular part of this, and is particularly relevant to the thinking about strategic priorities for the year. You should say yes to new feature requests sparingly; but “no”s don’t have to be negative. You can use your “no”s to align stakeholders to your strategic goals - and to validate those strategic goals to make sure they’re the right ones.