Product Owners Are The Conductors of Product Development

Just like the world-class conductors of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, best-in-class Product owners understand the full context of the product they are creating particularly in regards to the customer, the larger organization and their team.

Understanding the customer – The FUNharmonics event is geared toward families and children. With an understanding of the audience, the Conductor designs a performance to keep children engaged by adding features to the show such as storytelling between pieces and images shown alongside the music. In a similar way, a Product Owner needs to understand their customer so that, like the Conductor tailoring their performance to children, the Product Owner can create a product tailored to their customer.

Fitting into the larger organization – Although the goal of the FUNharmonics event is to create an engaging performance for family and children, the Conductor must keep the overall Orchestra’s objectives in mind when creating the performance. For this reason, the stated purpose of the FUNharmonics event is to spread the joy of classical music to families, not simply create an enjoyable family-friendly event. Good product owners take the same approach in identifying how their team goals fit with the larger organization by making sure that the success of their team contributes to the success of the overall organization.

Leveraging the team’s expertise – Like the Conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra working alongside world-class musicians, a good Product Owner understands that members of their team have diverse expertise that can be used to deliver value. The conductor will leverage musicians’ abilities when designing the FUNharmonics performance, by asking for help from the musicians and soliciting their feedback. In a similar way, a good Product Owner doesn’t direct, they work with the team to identify desired outcomes and decide what needs to be done to achieve those outcomes.