Why Product Owners and Developers need to work together (literally)
Last week, we faced a problem. One that probably most of you face daily: We have too many things we want to build and improve, too little people doing it.
But our most urgent topic was: We knew we were losing potential users every day because our onboarding flow is (was!) too complex. So we decided to make it simpler for users (which usually means more work for the ones who build the tool).
One could think: Everyone works as fast as possible on their part to get things shipped. We had defined the result beforehand, a clear epic. Split it into stories. Textbook preparation. But you know how reality goes: There's stuff you did not consider. Questions are popping up mid-development.
Let's say Christian is our Frontend developer. Theresa our PO and QA.
That means Christian builds something. Then Theresa tests it afterwards. Theresa finds something, but Christian is already deep in the next thing. So she has to write a Jira comment. Or worse: a ticket. Christian comes back to it later, but something is unclear. So they sync again, maybe write down results. But someone loses context, and the loop starts over. That's where time goes to die (or users never get to try our tool).
So we decided to literally work together. One desk, one big screen. Instead of one person doing things, we did it with two. Yes, sometimes one person just watched the other typing for two minutes. We were faster anyways.
We weren't spending time in Jira comments, explaining, re-explaining, waiting for answers, getting back into the topic. We reduced all dependencies. That means: Christian has his IDE and the tool open and implements changes. Theresa tests the user flow and explains expectations right afterwards. All relevant decisions are immediately clarified.
A common trap: You tend to get lost and build more and more. Optimize a bit here. Strive for perfection there.
To avoid that, our most asked questions were:
- Is this change absolutely necessary?
- What's the simplest solution we can offer here? (we can beautify it later)
Maybe that is what Andrew Ng's suggestion to have a 1:1 ratio of developers and Product Managers looks like.
We've built in 2 days what might have stretched out over 2 weeks.
We know it's not possible in every situation. But it might be in some, and a way to save you weeks of syncs and actually ship results.
