If you could share this responsibility with the team so they know the context and outcomes desired by the business, you’ll have a larger pool of good ideas, including from folks who deeply know the code and push the roadmap from that perspective.
E.g. creating a holistic thinking environment: https://headheartbrain.com/resources/creating-a-thinking-env...
Opportunity Team meetings (or stakeholder chats - lead devs, architects, support peeps etc) always cover the general direction we want to go and are where the ideas for the backlog come from.
Example of easy benefit is if we have two things we want the product to do - this is where you learn what the options are and more importantly the rough costs/impacts. If something's going to cost 10x as much and require refactoring, I suddenly decide I don't want it as much as the other option.
Can also come up from mid-sprint from dev. (Real example) I had a US to add a new button. Dev noticed there was an internal 'button framework' already in place (as somebody had some a good job in the distant past). She asked if I could add a new US for next sprint to continue this work, so she could extend this framework and allow us to publish it. i.e. Focus on adding new controls to the config tool, and then delivering on the original US with a bit of config. I had no idea this untapped potential even existed - but for 2 weeks effort of one person, my product now has a configurable UI. Lost count of the number of issues where a customer query can now be answered with - Just add a new button/tab/menu (and then over time it's been easy to add contextual controls, make more tokens available to the target builder etc etc)
"Technical Debt" is often mentioned (hidden cost of a hacked together mess, increasing the cost of the next feature to be piled on top). What's satisfying are the "Technical Assets" like this - not just for me as I get a better product, but for the dev who can take pride in building something elegant and knowing this feature is theirs.
The product manager should be the overall decider, but the best products do not germinate out of a single person’s head.
They are saying the PM is responsible for collecting information from the customer and bringing that information to the team in an efficient manner so the team can make decisions based on that information.
If the PM brings incorrect or inadequate information, the resulting product will be poor because the team will have made its decisions on the basis of that poor information.
The PO reduces that inadvertent gatekeeping by being always available with customer insights so the devs don't twiddle their thumbs or worse, build thr wrong thing, because they were guessing what the customer wanted in the absence of actually talking to them.
The PO reduces gatekeeping because they are an always available customer.
It should not, but the PM is accountable. GP put it nicely, effective PMs know better what customers want than customers themselves. This keeps iterations fast as PMs can immediately answer questions on trade offs instead of going back to the customers (who don’t know).
Please don't attribute superhuman skills to any particular team member.
For modern products valuable enough to be worth building deliberately, nobody knows what the market wants.
The team has hypothesises which they validate with software releases. The PM is accountable for these experiments.
Also, the use of the word "effective" in the quoted sentence is a setup for a No True Scotsman.
I did not say that a PM will understand any customer issue, and yes sometimes new research is needed, which is expensive and time consuming.
I do not see the link to the true Scotsman argument as in my view my description of a PM is not mythical or heroic but quite common at least in my area.
I agree to most of this. The team - by virtue of building and operating the software product catering for many customers - can often understand the customer usecases and solution better than any one customer. But it is the team, as a whole, where this expertise resides. Not one member of the team who happens to have a particular role and title.
> I do not see the link to the true Scotsman argument
By adding the word "effective" in:
> effective PMs know better what customers want than customers themselves.
you seemed to imply that any counterexample of a PM who is not doing this as not a true effective PM, and hence, not worth discussing.
Which is why I made the distinction between accountable and responsible. I totally agree that it’s the team as a whole that’s responsible for the output of the team, and that it’s essential that everybody on the team has a customer focus.
> you seemed to imply that any counterexample of a PM who is not doing this as not a true effective PM, and hence, not worth discussing.
In my opinion, the better a PM understands their customers, the more effective they are in their role. I had thought that this would be relatively noncontroversial. It certainly wasn’t a dig against a some subset of my profession. Virtually all PMs that I’ve worked with see this as core to their role.
Now I am curious, was there anything in the wording of my reply, or in your past experience working with PMs, that caused you to reply?
No, it is not anything you said specifically, Geert. But I have direct and indirect knowledge of PMs who adopt the "All the shipped features were my ideas, the bugs and tech debt were added by engineers" attitude. This thread too gave my that vibe.
I have written more of my opinions on the PM orgs at [1] and [2]. Happy to chat more, if you are interested - my email is on my profile.
The PO is an always available customer.
And here's the wonderful thing about agile - if you happen to have an always available customer, you don't need a product owner
As PdO I see my job (and also that of my partner Dev Manager) as sheltering dev from the shit churning shit above and my sole purpose as providing backlog/semi-coherent guidance. My downward job is to make sure every 2 weeks some contiguous stories get created and I sign off on their completion on the way back up - and if my requests match what I get back, I have the joy of absorbing any corporate wrath. I'm a "shit-umbrella"
Positive part of the job is when something hits me I can't deflect, I can cash in a few of my 'hopefully not-a-cunt' credits from the team, explain why I'm changing backlog mid-sprint, throw myself at their mercy, explain the issue etc etc - and collectively provide a better result than'agile' could officially provide.