This is the third and final part of my series about Product Ownership concepts inspired by Netflix’s “The Crown.” To start from part one, check out The technical Debt of Elizabeth Regina, Product Owner.
I have written a fair bit lately about the idea of the monarch of Britain being a product owner, but of course, there can be more than one PO in an organization. If the queen is the PO of the monarchy, it can be said that the prime minister is the PO of the country, and indeed the product, called Great Britain.
Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill are probably the two best-known prime ministers of Britain in the 20th century. Loved by some, hated by others, those two leaders evoked strong emotions in their constituents then, and still do now decades later. Both had a stubborn, unrelenting drive to move the country in a certain direction, regardless of the obstacles that lay in their path. Both, I would argue, had a Product Goal.
For those who are not familiar with the idea of a product goal, it is a concept that emerged in the 2020 edition of the Scrum Guide. It’s defined as follows:
The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. The Product Goal is in the Product Backlog. The rest of the Product Backlog emerges to define “what” will fulfill the Product Goal. […]
The Product Goal is the long-term objective for the Scrum Team. They must fulfill (or abandon) one objective before taking on the next.
https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#product-backlog
For Churchill the Product Goal was simple: The country was in a war, and the Product Goal could be summed up in a single line: “Great Britain would remain an independent nation allied with an independent Europe.” This was the end state, the strategic goal.
From that strategic goal several “intermediate goals” emerged that changed several times to reflect the realities of that war: First it was to defend France, then (after the BEF was encircled at Dunkirk and Operation Dynamo), it became defending the island against German invasion, and finally it became supporting the allied forces in liberating Europe and winning the war. At each stage, the intermediate product goal was an easily stateable objective that could be broken down to many “backlog items” that could help fulfill that goal. And if the goal became untenable, it was abandoned and replaced.
For Thatcher, however, the story was a lot more complicated. Whereas Churchill’s goals were largely imposed on him, Thatcher came into a functioning system determined to change it to the core, not unlike a new CEO “reinventing” a company’s flagship product. As we know from the world of products, sometimes that process can save a company (as did the iMac), and sometimes it can engender tremendous backlash (New Coke, anyone?)
The noteworthy thing about Thatcher’s term is not that she thought to change a system that has been in place since Churchill’s days, but rather the way that she did it. She did not wave her hands and say “if we do this one thing, we will prosper mightily!” (as a certain current UK leader did to impose his own change on the country) – that’s not a product goal, that’s an election slogan. No. Thatcher had an image in her mind of a “future state” for her product (her country), and that image informed her every decision and her overall plan. The plan eventually became so synonymous with the woman that it came to bear her name – “Thatcherism”.
This is not a political or historical blog, and so I will not get into the question of “was Thatcher a good prime minister?” More relevant to this post is the question “Was Margaret Thatcher a good Product Owner?” I think the answer is that she was a visionary, but a bad Product Owner.
There is no denying that Thatcher transformed her country in ways that persist to this day. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, which would indicate that a majority of her stakeholders at the time thought she was doing a good job. She had a vision, she stuck to it, and she did her best to make it happen.
At the same time, she was notoriously inflexible, not keen to take advice or “stakeholder feedback” (even when it escalated to strikes, insurgency, and an assassination attempt,) and did not seek to change in response to the changing realities.I talked in this blog before about the idea of empirical management and the idea that you create value by releasing a product to market, and you create more value by gathering stakeholder feedback on your release and using that feedback to make the next version better. She did not seek to learn from the people she served and to adjust her stance based on that learning and eventually, that failure to learn led to her ousting.
I think there is a lesson here for us as product owners and agilists. One of the key features of the Product Goal, as opposed to the previous focus on the “Product Vision, ” is that while the Product Goal is long term it is not eternal or unique. It is something that you can get to in a reasonable amount of time, or abandon if the state of the market makes it untenable.
The ability of the product goal to change or indeed to fail is one of its most powerful features. It gives us the ability to imbed our empirical learning and experimentation not just in the day-to-day or Sprint-to-Sprint functioning of our team, but in the long term strategy of our product. In essence, it allows us to go from a mindset that says “This is where we’re going, let’s figure out how to get there” into one that says “This is where we’re going now, let’s figure out how to get there, and if ‘there’ is where we really want to go”
Want to talk more about the Product Goal, Thacher, or anything else in the agile sphere? Drop me a line at boaz@makecodebetter.com or through my linkedin page!