Purpose:
Product Development is the Product Owner’s ability to guide the creation and evolution of the product from concept to delivery. This competency is about turning customer needs and business goals into working solutions, ensuring learning, adaptation, and value delivery at every step.
Description:
Product Owners strong in Product Development facilitate the end-to-end process of building the right product. This includes discovery (understanding problems and opportunities), defining solutions, validating them with users, and collaborating with the team to deliver increments of value. Product Development requires balancing exploration with exploitation, iteratively refining ideas, and making sure delivery is aligned with both vision and reality. POs in this space are connectors between vision, feedback, and execution, fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement.
Key Behaviors:
- Discovery: Actively exploring customer problems, needs, and opportunities through research, interviews, and experiments.
- Solution Shaping: Translating insights into clear product concepts, features, and acceptance criteria.
- Validation: Testing hypotheses and solutions early and often—through prototyping, user feedback, and MVPs.
- Prioritization: Deciding what to build next based on value, feasibility, and learning.
- Iteration: Enabling incremental delivery, learning from each release, and adapting plans accordingly.
- Collaboration: Working closely with development teams, designers, and stakeholders to ensure shared understanding.
- Continuous Improvement: Leveraging feedback loops to refine the product and process for better outcomes.
Development Path (Competency Levels):
- Beginner:
- Supports basic discovery, refinement, and delivery activities.
- Helps document user stories and acceptance criteria.
- Intermediate:
- Leads ideation, validation, and iterative delivery, integrating regular feedback.
- Facilitates backlog refinement and incremental releases.
- Advanced:
- Orchestrates the entire discovery-to-delivery cycle, championing innovation.
- Establishes robust validation practices, optimizes value flow, and ensures the product evolves with user and market needs.
- Guide:
- Coaches teams in discovery, lean experimentation, and hypothesis-driven development.
- Introduces frameworks like Value Proposition Canvas and Testing Business Ideas (Osterwalder).
- Catalyst:
- Shapes product innovation practices across teams/organization.
- Pioneers adoption of new development frameworks.
- Influences product thinking in the wider community.
Summary:
Product Development empowers Product Owners to transform ideas into impactful products, ensuring alignment between vision, user needs, and delivery. Excellence in this area drives learning, value, and adaptability throughout the product lifecycle.