Richard Seroter

Talk About Know Priorities

VP of Product for CenturyLink, a Microsoft MVP, an instructor for developer-centric training company Pluralsight, the lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. As VP of Product for CenturyLink, he is responsible for product strategy, sprint planning, community contribution, and leading an expert team of product owners and analysts.

Find & Follow: @rseroter, http://seroter.wordpress.com/

Extra Links:

• Courses on Pluralsight
• Books on Amazon
• Articles on InfoQ
• Microsoft MVP
• CenturyLink Cloud

Notes:

• "they don't even need the service, they need what the service can give them"
• Cost of delay factor
• Strategic alignment to prevent blocking a team in the future
• Also focusing on deprioritization
• Just go through everything in the list comparing one vs another, rinse and repeat
• You should be able to build your products with few to no dependencies. Although sometimes it's impossible.
• don't loose your shared awareness
• the product owner is the voice of the customer in, and the voice of the technology out.
• one of the hardest parts is explaining priorities that span teams
• the entire job of the product owner is prioritization and that involves hard choices
• Instead of putting teams in a holding pattern or assign to help another team, make them work within the constraints to deliver whatever they can.
• Balance between transparency and making people understand the priorities
• An 18 month road-map is useless
• Execution matters. it gives you a free pass a bit to be flexible because you are continually shipping value.
• shipping value on a regular basis earns trust and leeway to alter the priorities a bit
• Ensure as much 1-1 feedback
• Having a back-office product owner can help cover internal voices that can be excluded from
• Use a brain trust, but push decisions to the edges
• The biggest place you get into trouble is when you think there is a single channel to collect requirements.
• Some will be vocal, some will be quite, some need face to face, some will fill out a survey, some will attend a conference
• The more options you can give your products owners and get feedback, the more rounded feedback you'll get.
• Don't let yourself get bogged down by so many sources of input that you are paralyzed
• Sometimes seeing behavior is the best feedback. Some people will just tell you what you want to hear.
• 90% of what you hear is what next. The constant drive of what is next.
• Best companies that execute well, explain well. They don't just announce a feature, they put in context.

Others doing a good job:

• Slack
• Trello