The Most Important Person on Your Project Team to have a Successful Product

Of course I’m a fan of Project Managers and project management, but they’re only the guide for the tasks to get the project done.  The most important aspect of the project is “will this solve the problem we’re spending all this money to solve”.  So whose job is that?

With your team, you can figure out all the requirements that are needed.  Collaborate and you can determine all that’s needed.  Once you know the problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll design the technical and functional solution.  Your development team will develop what’s needed.  Once the development is complete, you’ll test that it matches the requirements, and if everything is good, you can release your product.

Don’t like the waterfall approach?  No problem – let’s use agile!  You’ll determine all the user stories that need to be accomplished.  Get your team to iteratively build and test the solution.  Improve or add user stories and iteratively continue.

Without getting into waterfall vs agile development in this article, the mutual parts components are:

  • documenting what the solution should solve (requirements, user stories) at the appropriate level
  • testing that the solution matches the plan and considering if the solution isn’t yet right

It’s one thing to follow a detailed process (and I certainly advocate for a logical process!), but someone needs to completely own the solution.  They need to be the champion of the best solution possible.  They are the defender of success!  I can come up with a lot of fun names for this, but a Product Owner is critical to fighting for the best solution.  This person needs to own the product with a vision for the next iteration, and continually be thinking about how it could be improved further.  Of course, the Product Owner may not be the person paying for the work whether the work is performed internally or with a subcontractor.  Unless unlimited budget is available, appropriate reason is required to say “This is good enough for now, but I sure have some great ideas for the next round.”

star25 Apply this effectively

A Product Owner who is looking for the best solution possible should be assigned to every project.  This person needs to be aware of the cost limitations, but should always be considering ways to improve a solution while keeping a backlog list for improvement ideas.

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