The Product Owner is
the most misunderstood role within organizations and API Teams, but they are
the fuel that runs the whole API engine.
If you’ve ever read
one of our strategy eBooks or participated in one of our events like Adapt or
Die, we are fanatical about Outside-In.
For those that don’t know what this means, let me take a minute to
explain it. Outside-In is the concept of
understanding what the end user needs and building a solution that provides
that data using APIs. No more and no
less. The reason this concept is
important is that historically IT builds solutions to provide all the data they
have and tell the end users to figure out what they need. Kind of like a data dump and a pile of data
you need to sort through to find out what it is and the context of how to use the
data. This never worked, but IT had
limited time and resources to go through their lengthy process so they erred on
the side of everything so they didn’t get any more requests and they can move
onto the next project.
Well times have
changed and APIs has made the process of iterating to add information to
existing APIs a much easier and fast process…assuming the data is
available. So Outside-In is about
delivering what is needed.
This is where the
Product Owner comes in. They are the
voice of the end user and they bring this into the API team with detailed
requirements that are prioritized for the team to build solutions. The Product Owner is passionate about their
end user and the small little nuances to make improvements is something they
obsess about. They are the end users Advocate
and the API Team respects and follow the lead of the Product Owner. Sometimes, Product Owners will try new things
with customers based on a hypothesis and then they see the reaction and iterate
if the hypothesis starts to play out or kill quickly.
But the Product Owner
responsibilities don’t end there. In
fact, they are vital to the ongoing velocity and lifeline of the API Team. So what do we mean? Well to start, they build the vision and
excitement about what the end user needs and the impact this will make on the
end users job and impact for the company.
Providing context to the API team, opens the team into being part of the
solution and may have valuable feedback for the Product Owner to improve the
solution. The other responsibility is to
be available for the team to answer questions.
Developers run into technical challenges or maybe the data they want is
actually not in the level of detail needed.
The Product Owner may need to further explain the requirements or they
may need to change the requirement based on new information from the
developers. And in the end, the Product
Owner reviews the results of the work to confirm this meets the end users
needs.
So hopefully, this gives a better view into why the
Product Owner is so critical to the API Team and why this needs to be a full-time role. Don't tag this onto the
responsibilities of someone already on the API Team. Find someone passionate about end users. Someone that is curious. Someone with vision but able to dig into specifics. Someone willing to take risks and they're okay failing on occasion. Someone that is a great listener. Someone that loves to innovate!
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