Whether you feel that you are doing your Product Owner (PO) work for yourself, the success of the entrusted product will ensure the success of the entrusted product only by working with other people. The Product Owner should be strong in communicating and managing stakeholder relationships. An informed stakeholder is the prevention of future problems.
Basically, we could divide these stakeholders into two groups — colleagues from your company and people outside your company. Each of the two groups is approached differently by PO, and there's no telling which is more important. Depending on your specific role within the product organization (whether you are a pure PO or a combination of PO and PM) and especially according to the size of the company, the specific roles of stakeholders may vary, or even some will be missing. In this article, we will focus only on those internal stakeholders.
For your success, you need to be aware of the basic attributes of working with colleagues — how often I should see them, what to do with them, how much time we spend together, what my role is towards them and what their goals are. Try to put yourself in their role the same way you do with customers.
So let's look at internal stakeholders in more detail and point out their specifics in more detail. My experience comes from companies whose business is the sale of software, but the knowledge can certainly be applied in companies where the basis of the business is different from software, such as e-commerce or banks.
CEO
Here it will depend on the size of the company in which you operate, but often in product organizations the CEO is directly interested in specific plans and changes in the product. He probably won't be basing on details, but he wants to make sure that you think about new functionalities in line with the company's vision and strategy, that you have your decisions based on a thorough analysis of the competition and the market, that you have enough qualitative and quantitative data. These core areas must have the PO squeezed perfectly. Questions such as: “How much do we expect the new functionality to hit customers?” , “What benefit will the new functionality have for corporate turnover?” , “Is the feature targeted at existing or future customers?” “Why did we choose function X and not function Y?” To all these questions, the PO must have an answer and if it does not have one, it must find out as soon as possible. In top management, all stakeholder management is based on numbers and measurements. Since the company is set on goals related to financial success, the CEO will want to address them. Therefore, you should not be unfamiliar with metrics such as ARPU (Average revenue per user), MRR (monthly recurring revenue), DAU (daily active users), Churn rate (how many customers stop using your product over time), Retention rate (reverse churn metric), CAC (customer acquisition cost), etc. On general core metrics regardless of stakeholders, it is written hereunder. But the expectation of CEOs and management is that you not only understand these metrics and know what they mean, but also know how their values move. And that if any value is more significantly different from past values or from the benchmark in your field, then you also know what caused it.
Due to the time load of the CEO, it can be expected that there will be no time for details, so communication with this role needs to be set up as matter-of-factly, concisely and concisely as possible. A good practice that pays off for all stakeholders is to set expectations — let us know what you want to talk about at the meeting and send any supporting documents at least a day in advance.
If you have the opportunity to speak directly with the CEO, take it as a great opportunity to “sell” your vision. However, set everything up at the beginning and understand what the CEO expects from you. Only when you are able to handle the operational part of your role can you focus on your eventual visions of where to take the product further. Conversely, you may give the impression that instead of duties, you prefer to dream.
Product Department
As a PO, you will most often be in a Product organization whose leader is likely to be your supervisor. The responsibility of the product manager is to set the product strategy, its delivery using the roadmap, ensuring the business success of the product, and keeping the development price in balance with expected revenue and budget. Try to focus on these areas of interest in your communication. The product manager will have similar questions to the CEO, but will go into more detail and examine your decisions, e.g. about the scope of a particular functionality. He wants to be sure that development costs are used efficiently and based on proven hypotheses. It will help if you already have specific data in hand, such as team estimates for individual functionality or different variants. They will also appreciate that you yourself are interested in the adoption and scalability of new features.
It is necessary to build a relationship based on trust with your boss. One of the pillars of trust is also your interest in professional and personal development. Your development can take the form of training, attending conferences, attending meetups, and in the community (e.g. IN Prague or Brno). There are also a lot of books and other content (more here) to help you with getting a different perspective. Eva Novotná and Marek Grynhoff also talk about the development of PO in Video stream on Red Button Edu.
You should talk to the product leader regularly at 1:1 meetings, where you can discuss current topics, what is going well and what is not. It certainly pays to be honest and admit mistakes as well. Trust is absolutely key to your relationship with each other and any problems are best heard directly from you. Also, set up your relationship so that you don't have to wait too long for his/her decision if necessary. With the increasing confidence and satisfaction of the product boss, you can expect him to leave most of the decisions to you (even with all the consequences, whether positive or negative).
If you are part of a multi-person PO team, which in case you work on one of the parts of the product, your work also affects your colleague. Therefore, it is essential to share details of ongoing development and preparation of further projects with the entire product team. If you do not already have a regular meeting of product owners, be sure to introduce it. In addition to knowing in advance what you are working on, this regular meeting will also allow you to get feedback on your work.
Development team — Development, Design, Project Management and Agile Coach/Scrum master
You will spend the most time with the development team. Depending on the size and layout of the organization, he can also regularly collaborate with roles such as architect, engineering manager, project manager, agile coach/scrum master. The regular ceremonies you will have with your team as part of agile development are described in Scrum guide, here I attach a tip to Daily Stand up.
Even if someone may tell you that some ceremonies are not mandatory for you as a PO, always go to them. First of all, I would then pick up retrospectives. Understanding each other's point of view is absolutely essential for your cooperation. If you do not understand each other, cooperation will not work. It will always depend on the team, but my personal experience is that often more options come up during a sprint to continue further. Of course, the decision can also be made by the team, but it does not hurt to check this decision with you as well. If you don't agree, you've either wasted your time or even thrown away some work. And that's a shame.
Your basic task towards your team is to explain and convey information. Not all the ones you have, but the ones that give the team context, knowledge of the market or the competition. Don't assume that if you say something at a meeting, everyone will automatically remember it and act accordingly. It is not enough to say it twice or three times. You need to repeat the main concepts and important things constantly. As Reed Hastings of Netflix says, you have to repeat it so often that you don't enjoy repeating it yourself. For example, if one of your company's building blocks is your brand, it needs to be passed on to developers. Also regularly share with the team how the functionalities they have developed are used - make a simple dashboard and show it twice a week during the standup. It can include core product metrics (which you have to measure anyway, as I wrote above in the CEO section). Make it a routine and discuss over changes -- what may have caused the increase/decline. You will see what comes out of such a discussion and what great ideas for improvement arise.
The best ideas for functionality do not arise in the head of a single product person who is brilliant, but in a group of people who work together. When a good team is brought together and knowledge of the market, customer and competition is added, you gain tremendous ability to deliver really high-quality functionality that will be successful. It is no longer the case that PO invents and writes storks and throws assignments over the fence to developers after backlog refinement. On the contrary — together, name the problem you are solving and work together with the team to find a solution to it. And it doesn't just have to end with your scrum team — bring in someone from marketing, sales or even a customer. It has never happened to me before that some roles refuse this and if you really engage them, better functionality will arise again. The Scrum Master/Agile Coach can then be of great help by helping you moderate these meetings and you can focus fully on the content side of things.
It's marketing
One of the blind spots of many product managers is putting their work to market in the best way (go-to-market). That is why there are also roles in many companies as Product Marketing Manager. The goal of this role is precisely to help bring the functionality/product to the market so that all current and potential customers learn about it. You can make the best product, but if you don't make the right promo for it, there will be no success. Do you remember Microsoft Zune? The answer to Apple's iPod? Sure they don't. Although it was an objectively cool product that was superior to the iPod in many ways, it failed due to poor marketing.
Therefore, set up a very close cooperation with marketing, which should be focused on two basic areas. The first is understanding marketing what the new product/functionality does. This will allow the product to be presented effectively and correctly, pinpoint its most important characteristics and choose the most appropriate way to bring this information to the market. We talk about performance marketing (PPC), brand marketing, social media marketing, working with ambassadors and influencers, advertising in physical media, podcasts, etc. With all this, marketing can help, and you, in turn, provide them with the necessary fuel.
The second area is the control of the content that is generated in marketing. It is common (and indeed desirable) for marketing to be able to attract customers. And even at the cost of presenting some functionalities in a better light than they are. Do you recall photos of hamburgers from McDonalds or Burger King? And then what do you get in that greasy paper? That's what I'm talking about. A tech-savvy person has a problem with this, but trust me, if you don't do it, your competition will do it, and guess who will get the customer then? However, everything has its limits and therefore it is necessary to review the content and visuals of the campaigns together so that they do not contain misleading or false information. You are the ultimate owner of the product and its success or failure will always be up to you.
And what to look out for? The biggest pitfall is timing. On the one hand, there will be pressure on you to release the new functionality as soon as possible, on the other hand, marketing may not be ready for this yet. It will not have ready-made screenshots, videos, texts. Or the go-to-market strategy won't be done yet. The result can then be a campaign without an idea or of lower quality. You don't want to do that, because you often won't have a second attempt. Therefore, it is necessary to regularly deal with marketing with the deadlines for possible deployment to production, so that they have enough time to prepare everything. And here, too, the above applies. It is not enough to say everything just once, but to repeat it regularly. Over time, you will find the right rhythm and it will become a routine. Again, one piece of advice from practice — a perfectly filled Trello, Asana or Confluence board is no substitute for proactive and timely communication. Especially for important campaigns, intensive communication is needed — every day.
Customer Support
Who in the company has the most information about the problems that the customer has? Definitely customer support. It's their daily bread. What is the basic role of a product manager? Solve these problems. So it makes perfect sense to have a very close relationship with your customer support department. As I wrote above, each stakeholder has a slightly different view of the matter, and the ability of the product person is to extract the most important from it. So invite support for demos, give them training and proactively alert them to shortcomings. But don't think of support as just a source of information — information needs to flow in both directions. You, on the other hand, support them with information about the plans in the product, what will change, not further support what functionalities will be invested in and why. Help them write an official statement on some of the more pressing issues or bugs that we as product makers will not address.
It is a good idea to provide yourself with access to the tool (e.g. Zendesk), which customer support uses to read every day for at least 5 minutes what problems are currently being solved. Sometimes it can help detect problems even before they become a bigger problem. As part of onboarding new colleagues, it is then an excellent school to try to put on a headset for a day and listen to calls with customers. Be friends with customer support and have fun several times a week, and be sure to get ticket reports sent out.
Sales/Business development/Partnerships
Marketers are mainly seen in B2B, within B2C, Partnerships or Business Development departments focus on similar areas of interest. Their interest is to increase adoption of a product or service by bringing in a new customer or partner. They will come up with new ideas for functionality, change requirements and strict deadlines when the most important deal of the year will fail if something is not done by the next release. By this, I do not want to downplay it, but here it is necessary to distinguish signal from noise. It was good for me to look at several parameters of the requirement together and evaluate accordingly whether it is really worth investing in it and possibly when. The first parameter is a time constraint — does the option have a limited validity? For example, is it related to some action that cannot be postponed? The second is the potential — will this opportunity bring us tens, hundreds or thousands of new customers? The third is the complexity of development. From these parameters you can then make a simple Cost/Benefit analysis and compare it against other things on the roadmap. Other methodologies for prioritization can also be used such as e.g. RICE or WSJF. I'm adding nice summary by Productboard.
Simplified version of ICE, more hereunder
Legal department
If you are working on functionality that has something to do with money or handling customer data (which is basically everything today), you will need legal/compliance consulting. You want to be sure that the texts you use do not violate the law and that they do not expose your company to potential lawsuits by their obscurity.
What to look out for? Lawyers, by the nature of their work, are very careful, they try to cover all possible risks. However, this often significantly increases the amount of text, which then deteriorates the usability (UX) of the solution itself. Therefore, find a balance together, where the text is not much and is understandable and yet meets the necessary from the point of view of law. A copywriter will help you with the texts, who should have the right product feel and aim for good clarity. As a PO then you have to find the right balance.
In conclusion, let's summarize the most important principles. If you follow them and apply common sense in your work, it will certainly have a positive effect on your results and in the satisfaction of your customers and stakeholders.
Summary of the most important points
- In communication, support your claims with data (We know that only 15% of users pass our tutorial. Those who pass it have a 50% higher conversion rate, so we need to focus on the tutorial.)
- Set an agenda in advance for meetings, this will help your colleagues prepare and make the meeting more efficient. If you need some preparation, let colleagues know through a different channel than just an invitation to a meeting.
- Communicate more rather than less, regularly and clearly. It is not important to sound smart, but it is necessary to convey the right information so that it is received by the recipient. Make sure the other party understands what you are saying.
- Set Expected. Especially for executive roles (C-level, board, management), communicate ahead of time if something goes wrong or you do not meet the deadline. It is not easy to change plans when it becomes too late to know about the problem.
- Be empathetic. It is important to try to tap into the needs and perceptions of the role of the other side. What does that mean? For example, if a customer points out usability problems, it makes no sense to convince them that they cannot use the product, but rather to try to find out what problems have occurred and ensure a remedy.
- Do you ever feel clueless? Don't worry, you're not alone. There is always someone who can help you, just need to get in touch. And it applies in the other direction as well. Help others. Together, you are smarter and you will achieve better results.
Bonus tip: Be available and open to the rest of the company. If someone has a question, where should they ask? Newcomers in particular often do not know this. For me, the public channel on Slack, which we named #ask -prodotto. The advantage of this is that if one person asks, they all read it and have the opportunity to respond, or at least learn something.