Lead with the Customer and User in Mind
For a Product Owner to be effective at maximizing the value of their product, they should have a deep understanding of the customer's and user’s needs, pain points and goals. This helps them and the rest of the Scrum Team focus on customer outcomes when approaching product delivery.
The Evidence-Based Management concept of Unrealized Value can help with understanding whether a product is valuable. Unrealized Value is the gap between the outcomes that customers currently experience and the outcomes that they would like to experience. This gap represents market and product opportunities that the organization and teams can pursue. It can be described as a “satisfaction gap” between current and desired experiences.
Valuable product Increments reduce the size of the satisfaction gap, and reduce the Unrealized Value of the product.
As the Scrum Team works to develop and deliver value to customers, make sure that as a Product Owner, you are not a bottleneck between the Developers and the stakeholders, which includes customers and users. In fact, you can even take on a facilitator role to encourage collaboration between Developers and customers. Gaining insights about customer satisfaction, needs and challenges and potential future opportunities are invaluable for anyone on the Scrum Team. There are multiple ways Scrum Team members can engage with their customers and users in order to get to know them better. You can learn more about how to understand their concept of value, needs and problems in the resource “Ways to Understand Customer and User Needs.”
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