Product Owner's Techniques of Saying “No” to a Great Idea
Elias Michel El Khoury, MBA, PMI-ACP
Technical Director - Software Engineering at Beytek SAL Offshore | MBA, PMI ACP
Saying "No" in general is an art and is hard, let alone having to say it to someone shooting you with a great idea!
In my previous article, I discussed the general techniques of saying no. In this article I will focus more on a product owner in an agile software team finding himself in such situation:
- Providing a satisfactory alternative
- Highlighting the never-ending backlog and having a clear vision on the roadmap
Providing a satisfactory alternative
The product owner should make sure that the product vision aligns with the strategic objectives of the organization because as we all know, strategy is implemented through projects, and if a project does not serve the objectives within the strategy, then the project is useless.
For instance, if the customer gives the product owner an idea of a feature he wants, the first thing that the product owner should do is analyze the idea and ask himself the question:
Does it serve the greater good of the product?
If it doesn’t, he should try understanding the real business needs behind the suggested idea and offer an alternative that achieves the same business needs while being aligned with the product vision.
Highlighting the never-ending backlog and having a clear vision on the roadmap
The roadmap would give us a visibility on the high-level priorities of the next 12 months max, while the backlog is for the more immediate future than that.
Therefore, whenever asked for an urgent feature that cannot be tackled as urgently as expected, the product owner should take into consideration the velocity of the team, the urgency of upcoming features, and the size of the backlog before giving an answer. The answer here would look like:
It’s not something we can do right now, but I’ll add it to the backlog and we’ll tackle it as soon as we can!
Another example is when the team wants to do a refactoring of a large module while the product owner knows that there is a feature that needs to be delivered urgently.
In that case, the product owner discusses the benefits, the impact and the urgency of this refactoring with the team, and plan for it accordingly.