A Successful Product Manager Has To Know How Their Product Is Built

If a product manager doesn't know how the product they are managing is built there is simply no way for them to be successful as they should be. That is unless they are carried by their team. It is essential that to make coherent and intelligent decisions about a product, that the product manager understands the impact that these decisions might have. The only way to do this is to understand how the product is built.

This doesn't necessarily mean that in a software development project that the product manager has to be a software developer. What it does mean is that the product manager works with the team to understand the implications of decisions. This understanding is facilitated by the product team sitting together. In a scrum sense, this means that the product owner, scrum master and scrum team all sit together. This means when an issue arises everyone in the team knows about it simply through work based conversation. Status meetings become less of a priority when the team sits together as immediately the entire team knows of an issue and can define ways to solve it - together.

By sitting together, even if the product owner is not a software developer, the team as a whole learns the impact of how decisions affect the team and conversely the team gains a finer understanding of why some decisions are made.

If the Scrum team and product owner are not co-located:

• The scrum team has no vision of why decisions are made and what 'north bound' management issues are influencing decisions
• The product owner has less 'south bound' vision of how stake holder issues impact the scrum development process.

The answer to overcome these issues is simple. A product team should sit together. A team that sits together by default will communicate more often, more clearly, solve issues far more quickly and pass on knowledge to each other through osmosis. This means that knowledge is shared without team members even trying to share it. This in turn creates a motivated team that learns together, delivers together and more importantly has fun doing so.

Co-location of a team is a simple mechanism to improve. 

Cheers

Murray