If You Aren’t the Product Owner, Be a Product Champion
By: Jessica Turner
Tags: Digital Product, Agency, Product Management, Product Owner, Product Strategy

Image from stocksnap.io

This was originally written a few years back but still rings true throughout the work we do at Invoke.

Working in a company like Invoke gives you the opportunity to touch multiple products, experience unique situations, and solve an endless number of problems. It’s the kind of experience you can’t get from working on a single product, and we’re able to bring this robust knowledge to every project we touch.

When you take all of this product experience into a client project, it’s natural to want to take take the reins. However, we need to remember there is a shared responsibility: we must work together as product owners.

The Scrum Methodology follows this definition of product owner:

The product owner is the one person ultimately responsible for the return on investment of the product development effort. They influence the development effort by conveying their vision to the team and prioritizing the product backlog. The product owner must have the authority to make real business decisions, a vision about what the product could be, and be available to the team.

The product owner may be the captain of the ship, but they aren’t navigating the waters alone. As an agency, we aren’t necessarily a full-fledged product owner, but as product strategists we have the opportunity to point the product in a winning direction. We can guide it throughout design and development sprints by becoming strong product champions.

In some instances, our client may not have a true product owner on their team, in which case we work with them to establish a singular decision maker and demonstrate the importance and the benefits of this role. The product champion on our side is intended to coach and work with the client side team to ensure that the project stays on course for success.

If you’re going to be a successful product champion, make sure you nail the following points.

Be a CEO

While we aren’t the ultimate decision maker, it’s fundamental that we treat the product as if it were our own. We put our heart into it just as a dedicated CEO would. Together with our clients, we act like co-CEOs. We get familiar with the value drivers, the industry, the target market, competition, and adjacent markets. This allows us to identify trends and uncover the opportunity to do something new or fill a gap in the market space.

Part of being the CEO also involves assuming responsibility for the product’s performance in the market, profit and loss and growth and engagement. If our latest round of learnings doesn’t resonate strongly with users then we’ll doggedly look for what is working and focus there. Most importantly, we keep the business model and ROI a part of the conversation to ground our efforts and ensure alignment with longer-term goals. Ultimately, CEOs — and product champions — want to win.

Be Empathetic and Humble

Armed with industry knowledge, practicing empathy and humility starts with understanding the perspective of the users. Decisions need to come from a real source, so we ditch assumptions and ‘best practices’ in favour of discovering what they’re trying to achieve when using the product and what triggers their actions. We take what they say and do to heart, but always peek behind the curtain and understand the root causes before jumping to solutions. Only once you understand the users can you become truly empathetic to their goals and act as their champion.

Be mindful that empathy and humility don’t end with users. It’s also important to listen to the strategists, designers, developers, community managers, and others on the project. Take this wide array of ideas and observations into account. Stakeholders will always have input on what users want (even if they are removed from day-to-day interactions with them,) but it’s the product champion’s job to shed light on user voice and fight for what will impact the long-term viability of the product. At the end of the day solving user needs — in a monetizable way — is what is going to translate to a product that wins.

Embrace Discomfort

Not every decision is going to be the right decision and not every situation will feel comfortable. Product champions need to be prepared to go beyond what is merely working and aim for the shifts that can transform the product. It can be uncomfortable when things don’t go as planned, but a product champion needs to know — and admit — when something isn’t performing so they can move in a direction that can succeed.

It can be an uncomfortable conversation when you tell a client that something isn’t working as intended, but these are the hard conversations that need to be had. If you set clear expectations and a level of openness when the relationship kicks off, you can be prepared to address any concerns moving forward. Ensure they’re aware that a product’s strength comes from facing challenges head-on and being open to vulnerability and learning. These decisions must be driven by a concrete hypothesis grounded in qualitative and quantitative data, but that doesn’t mean they are impervious to failure. Failure means we’ve gone beyond comfort zones, learned something, and discovered an opportunity for improvement.

Drive the Roadmap

Ultimately, all of these decisions along the way must align with the product vision. It is absolutely vital that we work early on with the client team and their product owner to develop a mutual understanding of the vision. This enables us to build a foundational product roadmap, but it’s important to remember that it’s not permanent. As mentioned earlier, user feedback, analytics, market trends, and monetization experiments give us valuable insights to drive continuous adjustments that add value to the original vision. This is how a product roadmap pivots and changes.

Pivots can occur when we have identified new initiatives with clear indicators of user and business model validation. Prioritization of new initiatives must consider not only immediate efforts but how it impacts the long term vision for the product. Every time something is introduced to the roadmap, we must be able to explain how and why it adds value to the product and user. Clear rationale gives client teams a straightforward roadmap to follow as they take the reins.

This is our shared foundation. Care like you’re the CEO, exhibit empathy with your users and product team, transform discomfort into iterative change, and ensure the team is aligned on an informed product vision. These are the traits of a successful product champion.

We believe it is possible for two teams to co-create amazing products that win the future. Whether you’re the client or internal product team, remember these lessons and hold each other accountable. It takes a vested interest from product champions, product owners, and advisors to win the future.

What have you found to be an essential to building and supporting great products?