As a team without a product owner, we needed to figure out what is our idea of what someone with product management specialization could bring us? And we hit the discussion around the mysterious "customer voice".
At first we realized that having someone allocated as a "customer voice" with "decision power" (a product owner), isn't an automatic ticket for the team to hear any of that. So we ended up identifying a significant chunk of work the team isn't doing, would love done better and goes under the theme of trawling for feedback.
With customers in the millions, there's the feedback we get without them saying anything through monitoring. Knowing when they have troubles, knowing when they use features we think they must be using, all of that is primarily a privacy but then a technical challenge. Just the idea of going for no product owner made us amp up our ability to see without invading privacy. It was necessary before, but now it was our decision to include the tools that improve our ability to help our customers. Mental state does wonders, it seems.
Then there's the feedback that requires time and effort. Reading emails and replying them. Meeting people on specific topics and meeting people on general topic for serendipitous feedback to emerge. There's the skill of recognizing what feedback is critical. Being available for feedback, and identifying what of it is the core, not the noise. And passing the core to people who can do something about it - the team.
We realized there is a fascinating aspect of timing to this feedback trawling. Think of is as comparison to trawling for fish.
If you get a lot of fish without the proper storing and processing facilities, it will go bad and get wasted.
Feedback is similar - it is at its maximum power when fresh. That extra piece of motivation when you see the real person behind the feedback gets lost when we store the feedback for an appropriate time to act on it.
Having to deal with lots of fish at once creates costs without adding much value.
While writing down a thing is a small cost, going through all the things we have written down, telling people of their status, and our ideas of their importance isn't a small cost anymore.
If you pass a fish from the fisherman to the second person in the chain, it is not as fresh anymore.
First-hand delivered feedback to the developers just is different. It's more likely to be acted on the right way, with added innovation.
At first we realized that having someone allocated as a "customer voice" with "decision power" (a product owner), isn't an automatic ticket for the team to hear any of that. So we ended up identifying a significant chunk of work the team isn't doing, would love done better and goes under the theme of trawling for feedback.
With customers in the millions, there's the feedback we get without them saying anything through monitoring. Knowing when they have troubles, knowing when they use features we think they must be using, all of that is primarily a privacy but then a technical challenge. Just the idea of going for no product owner made us amp up our ability to see without invading privacy. It was necessary before, but now it was our decision to include the tools that improve our ability to help our customers. Mental state does wonders, it seems.
Then there's the feedback that requires time and effort. Reading emails and replying them. Meeting people on specific topics and meeting people on general topic for serendipitous feedback to emerge. There's the skill of recognizing what feedback is critical. Being available for feedback, and identifying what of it is the core, not the noise. And passing the core to people who can do something about it - the team.
We realized there is a fascinating aspect of timing to this feedback trawling. Think of is as comparison to trawling for fish.
If you get a lot of fish without the proper storing and processing facilities, it will go bad and get wasted.
Feedback is similar - it is at its maximum power when fresh. That extra piece of motivation when you see the real person behind the feedback gets lost when we store the feedback for an appropriate time to act on it.
Having to deal with lots of fish at once creates costs without adding much value.
While writing down a thing is a small cost, going through all the things we have written down, telling people of their status, and our ideas of their importance isn't a small cost anymore.
If you pass a fish from the fisherman to the second person in the chain, it is not as fresh anymore.
First-hand delivered feedback to the developers just is different. It's more likely to be acted on the right way, with added innovation.
