The Challenge
Knowledge about a product navigates product owners through a maze of complex decisions they need to make regularly. Awareness of the business needs behind a product, the users who will benefit from it, and the functionalities it puts on the table, helps product owners maximize delivered value and successfully collaborate with stakeholders. Such awareness and expertise take time to build, so product owners invest significant effort to understand their field of interest and strengthen their knowledge.
But what happens when consultant product owners join a new project and need to quickly identify valuable information specific to client business goals?
The challenge resides in the fact projects often have a limited duration, and clients have their own knowledge networks that consultants need to adapt to.
In this scenario, product owners benefit from being flexible and capable of balancing focus on client needs and adaptation to the project environment.
To maintain such balance, I have followed four guidelines that have helped me consult as a product owner. These can be summarized as aligning with a new team, identifying the right knowledge sources, and building trust by strengthening communication skills and knowing how to share knowledge in the right way.
4 Guidelines for Product Owners
1. Strong Team Collaboration
While knowledge about a product stands as a centerpoint of the product owner role, strong collaboration with the team accelerates the pace toward great performance. Therefore, maintaining a balance between learning about a product and learning about the team’s inner processes can provide invaluable information about the project’s dynamics.
For example, transparent communication with Scrum Masters can provide insight not just into common blockers but also into how the team processes information about product goals. Establishing procedures for managing user story creation as a team and learning how a team responds to different Scrum events can also significantly improve the health of a backlog. When product owners understand how to analyze information and participate in discussions, they build the backlog more efficiently by clarifying and channeling key data required to successfully deliver product goals.
2. Active Listening
Joining a new project can be a significant challenge, and we often want to showcase our strengths as soon as possible in order to build a good relationship with a client.
But one of the best ways to provide support is to also turn our focus outward and actively listen to clients’ needs. Whether we interpret written or oral communication, we should carefully analyze the information to truly understand how our expertise can close the gaps and bring value.
Being an active listener also gives us another advantage: identifying key subject matter experts who can help us learn and adapt.
3. Identifying Subject Matter Experts
Consultants adapt to the assigned project team structure and identify the main communication points to set up their workflow and successfully collaborate with clients.
The Product Owner role often requires expanding our outreach and actively searching for subject matter experts (SMEs) who can help us understand a product’s core and the value we need to bring to the table. A good approach could include paying attention to who attends meetings and is active on communication channels, along with the topics they discuss and the manner they use for topic analysis. Once we identify the network of contacts, we can use it to build a clearer image of the product we manage.
4. Knowing How to Share Knowledge
Knowledge can be shared in many different forms, and if a product owner identifies the ones that fit client needs, they can build trust in their expertise and experience. The process of recognizing the right approach to share knowledge includes researching what a client prefers in areas such as:
- Presentation style
- Preferred written format (articles, blogs, or similar)
- Method of communication (language style, channels, manner of speech)
Each Project Is a New Beginning
Each project brings forth a new set of topics to learn, challenges to overcome, and methods to incorporate to adapt to a new working environment.
Therefore, the listed guidelines open a dialogue that will continue in the next blog, where I will interview other product owners and highlight the guidelines they follow to be successful consultant product owners.
