A product owner is an agile software development team that defines user stories and prioritises the Team Backlog to streamline priorities. From the role name, it seems only the product owner is in charge of the production tasks. Still, it shouldn't be as the entire development team, from developers to designers and marketers, play essential roles in bringing the product (project) to completion. Hence the need for each member of the team to have product skills.
This post highlights a few product skills useful for developers building products.
A product-mindset.
To build products that people love, you need to know your customer better than your best friend. You need to understand the conditions of their lives and the intricacies of their state of mind as they undertake the journey your product takes them on. - Carlos González de Villaumbrosia, CEO of Product School
To achieve that highlighted above, developers in product teams need to think iteratively and adapt to change fast. A product mindset enables developers to be better teammates and collaborators in building to solve customers (users) problems.
Decision-making is pivotal in having good product skills; making quick decisions, thinking about every aspect of the product, and putting the customer first is critical.
Product minded developers are:
- Open-minded
- Patient
- Care about product usability
- Curious about learning
To learn more about getting a product mindset, check out this exciting article, Product mindset for developers.
Know which tickets to prioritise
Before starting on a ticket in the backlog during sprints, developers with a product mindset and in-depth understanding of their customers should consider what impact the ticket has on the product.
In the following scenarios, developers have to decide as to which ticket to prioritise:
- "This bug is affecting three enterprise customers and is of higher monetary value to fix than the other that that's affecting ten low-value accounts." - Zumvie blog post
- "This feature will cost us more in terms of time and development effort but will be more profitable in the long run than the other"
- "Should I refactor this codebase now or wait till we are to onboard new developers?"
To make better decisions or tradeoffs in any of the above scenarios, check out these "15 Strategies For Prioritizing Your Tech Team's Tickets".
Working well in a team
Great teamwork gets the job done in the best and fastest way possible, whether it be a fully remote team or an onsite team. The ability for each team member to implement the above-highlighted skills into the development process is a skill on its own. Teamwork is pivotal to building a better product that customers will love. Truly:
Teamwork makes the dream work.
To learn more about teamwork, see 12 easy ways to improve workplace teamwork
Summary
In this post, you learnt about product skills useful for developers in building better products. Highlighting these skills here is not saying that developers should become product managers; this is saying that teams with product thinking developers build better products.