Product Owners Respond to Teams Practising DDD
Success stories from Event Storming Workshops
Some PM’s/PO’s are Strategic, some are Tactical
This is where most teams get stuck. You need to understanding who you are dealing with. Is it a Product Owner assigned to your team? They are likely an Individual Contributor and have a purely tactical responsibility.
Is it a VPEaP (Vice President of Engineering and Product) or VPP? A CPO? They are extremely zoomed out and focusing on product strategy, not execution.
When it comes to the intersection with an engineering department, it’s important to establish joint-tactical leadership or —failing that— full alignment with the strategic person’s vision.
Tactical Product decisions require detail, roadmaps and execution certainty.
Strategic Product decisions require risk management, investment and product debt management.
How does Event Storming / Modeling help with this?
Here are some signals to navigate your roles:
An expert who talks and corrects details frequently on storming sessions is tactical
The person asking whether to build it or outsource it is strategic
The product person adding features is tactical. The one removing is both.
A tactical PO will want detail in all events and commands, giving a clear picture of the deliverables and roadmap. Event Modeling is superb for this!
A CPO requires overall value-stream alignment so they can coordinate teams. These conversations are focused on dependency-management between teams, parallelisation and resource optimisation.
Product Managers manage no one - help!
A tactical PM who has engineering manager (EM) peers has zero direct reports. This means their entire contribution is linked to the success and feedback from the engineering department.
Because this responsibility overlaps with the EM they get left out of the loop—or merely informed.
This can foster a feeling of powerlessness.
When powerless, a Product Manager will resort to over-communicating and micro-managing.
Yes. You hate that.
No. They aren’t doing it out of malice.
Building a mutual ubiquitous language (DDD) with them is a strong bridge-building exercise to ensure constant alignment.
You know that feeling when you’re on track and product changes something last-minute?
You know that feeling when you’re on track and they ask you to estimate new things that you cannot commit to?
The problem isn’t the change.
Change is a signal that you have received feedback on how to provide more value.
When you provide more value, you can capture more revenue.
The problem is getting changes last-minute!
This surprise factor is the strongest signal that I have found for an engineering team that is misaligned with their product.
You are building a product. Not code. You should be aware of customer feedback at the same cadence as your PM. And welcome it.
Adapt. Release often. If you release often, they won’t bother you with estimates. 👇👇
Build Trust by Fostering Mutual Understanding
There are two levels of understanding:
You understand someone.
They feel you understand them.
Which one is more important?
I’ll give you a moment.
.
.
.
Trust is a two-way street. You — someone from engineering — understanding your product owners is only half of the journey.
The other half is communicating it in a way that they agree with you. This can take many forms:
Mirroring and Labeling (see Chris Voss, Black Swan Group)
Repeating back what you heard and summarising your understanding so they can confirm it. Keep repeating until they do.
Empowering them to make revisions to your plans without resistance or apology.
The Handshake - Event Storming / Modeling
The quote below is one I remember vividly from one of our recent event stormings. I facilitated the session as a coach. I prepped the engineers on how to ask questions, hold frame and show curiosity. What to focus on.
Then we invited their product owner.
They proceeded to have a kind of conversation they never had before.
At the end, the product owner said:
“𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝.”
…
“𝐖𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭.”
Wow!
Isn’t that powerful?
Isn’t that the kind of relationship you want your team to have with business stakeholders? With Product? With Designers? With Marketing?
With your Customers?
If you’re having strong, emotional meetings when it comes to roadmap planning and estimates - check out the article below. It will help you in your next meeting.
