Case Background: Xiao A, with more than six years of work experience, is engaged in the development of telecommunications equipment in A large company. A few months ago, SHE was appointed as APO (Area Product Owner), responsible for three Scrum teams, reporting to the next PO, and also has her own line manager. Prior to that, he was a technical expert on a Scrum team and was well liked by colleagues and leaders in his technical field. At present, he has numerous meetings, various problems, and occasionally has to help others to fix bugs. He is extremely busy at work. At the same time, because he is not a real product manager, he cannot make many decisions on his own, so he often feels powerless and confused about where the future lies.
Unlike the typical products of small companies or Internet companies, software systems in the telecom equipment industry are complex, often requiring thousands of people to build a system. Even in Agile mode, PO is hierarchical in order to support the Scaling Agile. Three layers are common, the higher you go, the more you lean towards management and coordination, and the lower you go, the more you lean towards actual requirements management and technology. At the lowest level, A PO is usually transformed from a technical expert. In the first few months, there are often many puzzles, such as: unable to spend more time on their favorite technology; It takes a lot of time to deal with a lot of people, and quarrels are common. Many seemingly simple things are not easy to promote, so I can’t adapt to this working state. I often want to go back to the past and do pure technology.
What exactly is a PO position? In Internet companies, PO, as product manager, is the synthesis of technology, business and user experience, and has the power to decide the future of products. But in the telecom equipment category, the situation is slightly different. I summarize PO as a combination of technology, management, and human nature, as follows:
Big lower-middle-class PO in the product, not just management requirements, at the same time also will be responsible for managing project schedule in the form of agile and resource allocation () iteration planning and its implementation, and its itself usually do not have right to use the money, also not the line manager of development and testing personnel, cannot use to motivate the employees, such as a promotion and pay increase In addition to using technological influence and mastering management skills, it is also necessary to strengthen the understanding of people and give full play to the mode of influence to carry out work.
Since skills, management and understanding of human nature must be expanded in order to be a competent PO, this also means that a competent PO can make a variety of choices for the future: Senior POSITIONS such as PO, big project management, line manager, Agile coach, reinventing technology or starting your own business are, in a sense, one of the few positions in a large company that allows for rapid growth. For example, communication and negotiation skills will be honed, as well as temper, due to constant conflict coordination. Due to the same experience, it takes a certain period of adaptation for PO in the telecom industry to switch to the Internet industry, but it is not difficult. In a word, PO has a bright future. It can advance or retreat, so let’s move forward boldly.
In the context of a complex project in a large company, some experiences of becoming a good PO are for reference only:
Keep sincerity and transparency, make oneself more reliable to participate in the activities of the company inside and outside the community, expanding horizons Opportunity as much as possible to participate in the high-level technical and management meeting, proactive, to speak more Think hard, to try new ways of working, don’t be afraid of failure Appropriate to give up the attention of the technical details, focus can be focused on continuous learning on the system architecture, Cultivate a wide range of knowledge base, to others will think you are experts in many ways, easy to communicate with all kinds of people and team to get on well with everyone, but try not to management on the job to the individual, team with only a small team management for the unit Furthermore, a contract spirit “businessman”, the idea of building and teamwork, and win-win development, Rather than just management figuring out who you are, to the team, you represent the external client, but make the team feel that you and their interests are really aligned; For the real customer, you represent the team, but you should make the customer trust that you can represent him for the long-term interests of the team, the team into their strong backing, as a whole external, Specifically, turn influencers on your team into Allies for more agile coaching insights at www.uperform.cn/blog-articl…