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April 13, 2017

Product Owner and Architect, agile tag-team

Picture yourself in an environment where agile practices are adopted as the standard way of developing solutions. Now if you're really ambitious, you're picturing yourself in an environment where there are no projects, only products. Consider yourself to be part of a team working on a product, a product team. The team is comprised of all the necessary expertises to create the product it's developing. The team you're part of is responsible for the product, cradle to grave.
But wait a minute, are you really part of the team? Or are you external to the team, but do consider yourself heavily involved with the team? You might be the Product Owner or an architect.

Is the PO not part of the team? Maybe, maybe not. It's not that important actually. And what about the architect? Is the architect not part of the team? Well, the architect, I would think and this is just my very humble opinion, is not part of the team. The architect is concerned with the team, but not this team, but all the teams that are in the architect's domain. The architect is there to ensure that the products form a cohesive landscape that, by synergy, creates the most value for the organisation as is thinkable. Back to the PO. The PO might own many products in a portfolio...

Your picture. Did you picture yourself in this organisation as part of the team, of a team, or as somebody outside the team? It doesn't really matter too much. Really.

The interesting part of such an organisation, be it a for-profit or a not-for-profit or even something governmental, such an organisation is catering for its business, for the users of its products. And the products are there to generate value, pure and simple, life's better with every new version of the products the organisation releases. The product teams are there to work on these products, to make sure that the users are actually able to use these products and once they have those products at their disposal, they can continue to use them.
Other than in more traditional organisations where products are developed in projects, where there is a project organisation and a operations department to keep the solutions running. In these organisations teams, the project teams, are only concerned with getting the products out. And in many organisations it doesn't even goes as far as that and the project teams are primarily concerned with ensuring the products are accepted by the operations department. This is how these organisations work, and this is how teams operate. That's not to say that the individual members of the teams are not concerned about the quality of what they create or whether or not users actually like their products and use them. And that's not to say that the people working operations department are not concerned with the development of the software and that the quality is great etc. Organisationally, there's a divide and more importantly there's no one single entity that is responsible cradle to grave for the products.

What about this tag-team, this agile tag-team?

The effectiveness of the PO-Architect team, this tag-team, is the greatest in this product oriented organisation. The more 'agile' is considered a business trait instead of just an IT trait or even solely a software development trait, the bigger the impact the tag-team can and will have on the bottomline of the organisation, in a positive way.

Here's why. The PO, when peeled like an onion is at the core only caring about creating business value. And the PO has two currencies that he can use to invest in order to create even more value. For one there's the crude oil of product development: €'s. Here we have the simple fact that the the business needs to be able to earn more money with the PO's products than the PO had to invest in creating the products. It's a simple matter of cost/benefit and ROI. The less the PO needs to spend, the more the business makes and the shorter the time for the business to earn back the investment the better.
But there's also the second currency, which is time. Time taking to create the product, or a new value creating feature of an existing product. Time has no ROI. You have to invest time, knowing you'll never get it back. You might save time with your product, but the time you invest, you can only invest once. This is important because you want to invest as little of that time in something that generates the most value. Think about this for a second... what it means is that you want to create a new product (or feature) that will generate the maximum value in a minimum timeframe. The crude oil, your €'s are secondary to this, as a PO, because you have a product team available that you need to pay for anyway. Remember, you're working in a product oriented organisation not a project oriented organisation. Your teams are pre-funded! This is also important to note.

So the priority of the PO should be generating as much business value as possible. Therefore the PO needs to prioritise the various products and their features such that the most value creating features are worked on by the product team first. And this is extremely tough for the PO, especially when the PO is not a business person because the PO needs to know what's good for the gander as that is good for the goose.
And in many cases the PO will need to experiment in order to find out whether or not a feature is really needed. Whether it is really going to be used. Whether the form it will be delivered in is the most optimal form. Experiments cost time as well, so the balance between experimenting and applying is critical.

This is where the architect comes in. Without the architect the PO is lost, or at least the PO is susceptible to overspending. First of all, the architect's view is more than just a product and is therefore prone know about solutions to partial problems available elsewhere in the organisation. And leverage them. The architect is the right person to lay the foundation for future features. In part by ensuring that there is a generic (application) infrastructure that can be leveraged throughout the lifecycle of the product. When the PO has the insight to define a product roadmap or a business direction for the product(s) to evolve in, and shares this with the architect. The architect will be even better equipped to pro-actively define the foundations of the products, where a little investment upfront pays itself back at a later stage. See the parallels with the PO, the architect is there to understand where and how best to invest product development time to save more product development time at a later stage.
But there's more, obviously. The architect, and this is the 'secondly' belonging to the 'first of all' from above, is best equipped to define where what corners can be cut for most impact and what experiments to run in order to get the most out of new or specific capabilities. The architect will be the single one person that understands how to scale the organisation's technologies. How to move from a simple, crude yet effective archaic technology to a more complex, elegant and sophisticated version and when to do so. The architect therefore can and will save the most valuable currency of the PO, feature development time, at every step of the way.

Remember that PO and business value creation? Value should be created as quickly as possible, so short development times are important. As much as possible value should be created, so the most desired product features with the biggest impact on the bottomline should be worked on by the team. But which are these features? Well the architect doesn't know these answers, but is perfectly suited to limit the amount of time it takes to either develop a feature or to find out what feature should be developed by devising an experiment. The PO still needs to run the experiment though.

Ah, here comes the hardest part of the post. How to set the right priorities? Which is a question the PO will need to answer. The common way to do this, the wrong way indeed, is to work on the simplest feature to develop. Or the one that can be delivered the fastest. Often these are the same features by the way. This will only result in the PO and the team to feel really good about themselves because they added many features to the product. Something that will in most cases be far from adding the most business value to the product.

Again the architect is a great team member for the PO in this as architecture is not about simple to develop features or quickly realisable solutions. Architecture is about ensuring durability, sustainability. It's about creating a playing field in which complex solutions can be developed quickly, because the groundwork has been done already and therefore a solid foundation is present.

The challenge is with the PO still as business value should be the key to the priority of the feature backlog. So with every feature the PO will need to define how much value will be created, preferably in terms of what will be changed, and what will be the benefit of the change. From a user's perspective, always from a user's perspective. The PO will also need to establish a baseline for each feature he's planning to invest development time in. This is for the simple reason that there's no way to determine whether or not you've improved life as you know it, without knowing what life is before you started your improvements. And consequently, the PO will need to start gathering the right metrics in order to know those improvements. Defining the reason why you want to change something, i.e. defining what the benefits will be, will more or less define what metrics will show progress and therefore what needs to be done to establish a baseline.
Leaves the PO with defining the top priority of all the features that need working on. And this is encoded in the metric used to measured progress and the reason for the change to be developed. From these a projected generated business value can be established.
And this is where the architect can shine again. Not with this little piece of math, but with the part about metrics and measurements. The architect will be the instigator of the existence of a set of architecture principles that allow for metrics and measurements. Principles that lead to the existence of comprehensive measurements, to profound standardisation of those aspects that need no specialisations, to extreme automation of setting up environments. This can be left with the product team, but when there are more than one team, there will be a need and at the least a benefit, of coherence across teams, which is where the architect is acting.

Concluding, the PO and the Architect make a wonderful team that jointly work on the best prioritisation of the feature backlog for the products of the PO. By doing so, they'll minimise the required investments in feature development time for the product team to develop a feature, all the while maximising the created business value. And as icing on the cake, they are in the process ensuring that the hypothesised improvements are validated. You want a cherry on top? With this awesome tag-team you have a perfect opportunity to define a ubiquitous language which is business domain specific and spoken across the whole of the organisation.


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