Table or Booth?

Product Owners Should Be Engineers

To regain competitive foothold, Steve Ballmer is putting engineering leaders into product managment roles.  I think this is wise.  

"You see the engineering team ascending because Steve is realizing that there is a need to execute on a vision and in order to do that you have to actually understand how software is built,” said Wes Miller, an analyst at the Kirkland, Washington-based research firm Directions on Microsoft. “It’s a whole other thing to be able to say, ‘I’ve been at Microsoft, I understand software, and what you are saying will or will not work.'"

It's a well known mantra that IT should align to the needs of the business.  This is a given.  But good product owners must also use their technical strength to let emerging innovation to shape the company's business.  

In today's software world, much of this innovation is licensed freely in the open source community.  If you're not paying attention or if your attitude is "not invented here", you'll be overrun in only a few short years.  

In short, great product owners bridge the constantly shifting gap between tech state-of-the-art and the competitive business world.  Ballmer deserves credit for recognizing this.

Will Your Project Succeed?

Ultimately group success of any kind is determined by good people doing good work.  Period.  A good sponsor, designer, and developer can build great software, no matter what the process or team structure – should they care enough to do it.