Working with the product owner

The product owner on an agile project has a lot to think about. If he’s commercially minded and driven by the desire to get features shipped, design and the focus on the customer experience often slips. Pairing the experience designer with the product owner as a product steward helps to ensure that the yin of the business is balanced with the yang of the customer.

Agile software development is inherently democratic. We let the product owner decide what is most important to him, what will deliver the greatest value and then build that first. The problem with this democracy, with this unleashed choice, is that the product owner doesn’t always know what’s best. He’s not always the best person to choose.

There is a difference between domain knowledge and what we’ll call experience knowledge. When prioritising requirements, the product owner will typically wear his commercial hat; he’s thinking about targets, and those are based on shifting product. He’s invoking his domain knowledge. But other than price, cold commercials are not what shift products. It’s the experience that does. For that you need experience knowledge. This is what the experience designer brings. Thus, the experience designer pairs with the product owner to: