
My experience as 'product owner' - achemystyle
I recently began working for a European government agency specialized in domain specific IT. My assigned role is &quot;product owner&quot;. One of my products is mostly a central data hub. This means that I have conducted interviews with many people in the organization. And this has given me pause:<p>1) I&#x27;d suspected a greater level of IT-knowledge. But hardly any product owners have any coding skills. Many do however have deep domain knowledge, which is more important.
 2) The few project managers we have, take charge of larger projects with many products. These people are hired only on generalized project capabilities. In my experience, project management  in IT is quite different from many other projects. The experienced project managers have gain IT skills - but only in the way &#x27;things are done here&#x27;.
 So the best project managers we have, kind of optimize locally, instead of looking beyond our own organization.
 3) We do not have an &#x27;IT-Vision&#x27; for our products. Instead we just go with whatever company who wins the bi- or quarter annually tender suggests.
 4) The vision we have is organizational: &quot;we want to be the best&quot;...
 5) I guess because of point 1 above, we spend horrendous amounts of time on &#x27;design&#x27; and specifications. I am by no means a big fan of scrum,
 but in our organization &#x27;design&#x27; and &#x27;specifications&#x27; basically means that a product owner with no IT skills sits down with the IT company&#x27;s service manager, project lead, business consultant (yes - up to three people) - none of whom have ever built an IT product themselves. The design end up as balsamiq mockups and 100 pages of specified functionality.
 5) The agreed price is very often far from the real cost, as many things &#x27;outside of the specification&#x27; arises later on.<p>Is this normal for an agency like mine (ca. 100 product managers, product owners + secretaries and other staff)<p>What do you think I should do to change our practices for the better?
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achemystyle
My own response:

I am considering proposing a draft for a product vision. Something like this:

Our _products_ should aim to be: a) Self-reliant: as few 3. party cookies,
cdn's and technologies as possible. b) Private : respect the user’s privacy.
Don't log more than we have to. Be explicit about what we do. GDPR. Combined
with self-reliant, this means no Google analytics e.g. c) Robust : Must work
on most platforms. Old and new. d) Simple : Nobody wants complex - but we
certainly don't strive for simple. Simple means: Have e.g. pure txt fallback
instead of "mobile optimized" pages. e) Connected : Use loosely coupled micro
services. Don't do what we have done a lot: take existing solution and add
functionality ad infinity. This complicated the code and tests. f) Get first,
visit later: Advocate decentral solutions, like mail, rss etc. Don't force the
user to check our webpages. Let us deliver the data. g) Open : So many things
require a user profile, just to consume info. If the info is not sensitive,
don’t require a user profile. If the user profile is an option, e.g. to save
preferences etc. then, as per the privacy guideline, allow 'fake profiles'.
Email etc. should be optional.

Internally we should: i) Try to develop projects as closely as possible with
the developers who do the actually work. This is what we did in my former
company. And it worked very well. ii) Product owners should be allowed greater
say in tech choice. And should bear larger responsibilities (e.g. bonus
related) for project costs. iii) Product cost should explicitly include e.g.
maintanance and bugs the first year. iV) Product owners should at least one
month a year, work with coding on some level. v) We prefer open source
software: Easier to support and staff, better life support (e.g. flash and
Silverlight gives us problems) and often much better documented than the tools
we build ourselves.

I think the gov.uk blog post currently trending here, is a good example of
what I hope the points above could result in. But I also feel the bullets are
kind of 'hot air', with little value. Not sure...

I hope some of you have some reflections on this.

