I came to be a PO for our costing software more or less by accident. I had experience with costing, I build costing algorithms and other modules into our former excel based tool and yeah I know FORTRAN!
I did know little though about what was expected of me and how people might depend on me and my thoughts.
A few things I learned during this time:
- Use the tool you are developing with your team extensibly, best in something like a ‘partner-coding’ session. This helps technical and domain people learn the different languages they need to speak to understand one another.
- Follow the organizational flow your team feels the most comfortable with. Fortunaltely, we had little constraints company-side on how to organize our workflow so we adjusted based on situation and team structure.
- QA devs are your best friends for high quality software!
- All devs are your best friends for high quality software! Take care of them
- Epics, User stories and tasks will always be slightly ambigous. Executing the first point gives the whole team a common understanding what the goal is
- Some people like freedom to explore solutions, some like to implement specs. Figure out who is who and bring them together!
- Read the code produced by your devs as much as possible. This helps you undertand their problems and might hint at domain issues.