Product Manager & Product Owner Hats

While a lot of emphasis is placed on the strategy role of a product manager, executing well to deliver the roadmap is equally important. During the roadmap execution phase a product manager may have to wear two different hats. One, of an externally focused product manager who continues product discovery to build a healthy backlog and the other of that of an internally focused product owner who works with engineering, CX and other internal stakeholders to ensure a successful release. If you are lucky you may be part of an organization where these roles are clearly differentiated and different individuals wear the respective hats but that is not usually the case at a startup or at a less mature product organization.

Outcome Based Product Backlog

A key to effective execution of a roadmap is having a healthy backlog that is well groomed and ready to be included into a sprint. The goal of each release should be a great outcome that adds value to customer rather than mere output in terms of story points or set number of stories. When the scrum team is working with a backlog that is not well groomed, the goal of the sprint becomes adding stories to the sprint to make sure capacity of the agile team is not wasted and when that happens the release has many features but the product owner would have a hard time articulating how the outcome of the release adds value to customers. When product owners are constantly building a healthy backlog  they are able to create a backlog that contains feature requests from multiple sources with a good mix of differentiating features, customer requested features, parity with competition and platform scalability features. To build a healthy backlog, product owners have to set aside time from their busy execution role to play the product manager role and conduct product discovery by talking to customers, internal stakeholders and market experts.

Backlog Grooming

Prior to the start of a sprint, backlog grooming is a very important activity that should be driven by the product owner. However, to effectively groom a backlog the product owner should partner with UX, architecture, engineering and testing leads. During backlog grooming, product owners get feedback from their counterparts on how best to setup the stories with great outcome in mind. It is often the case that some foundational capabilities need to be ready before the feature can be rolled out as part of a release and that is an insight the architects or engineering leads can provide to the product owner during the grooming activity. An insight like that helps the product owner break up one story to multiple and prioritize the individual stories appropriately into one or more stories depending on the complexity and effort. One key mistake product owner and the agile teams usually make is not breaking up a story to multiple smaller stories and this results in other unrelated and not so important stories creeping into a sprint to fill the sprint capacity.

Let Scrum Master drive the sprint execution

Once the backlog is well groomed and the product owner has prioritized the stories appropriately, they should let the scrum master and the self-managed agile team perform the rest of the execution activities. The product owners should be available to answer any questions, clarify requirements and update stories as needed but once a sprint starts, the product owner’s focus should switch back to discovery and backlog building. One mistake product owners often make during the sprint execution phase is get too involved in day to day execution during this phase and this results in them falling behind on building a healthy backlog for the future.

Prepare for internal and external communication

While focusing on discovery and backlog building during the sprint execution phase, the other key activity that product owner shouldn’t lose sight of, is putting together an internal and external communication plan and material needed for the same. This should typically be aligned to a release cycle and may not be needed at the end of each sprint but the product owner should not postpone this key activity to the end. The agile team may get everything right and build the best backlog, groom it effectively and deliver the outcome required with each sprint but the feature is only as good as how well it is understood and communicated to the end user and stakeholders.

For more detailed information on how best to create an effective roadmap and learn how to use an operational framework with a live example, please complete this free course on Discovery to Roadmap to Release plan.