As a product owner you constantly between the hammer and the anvil - trying to reach agreement between stakeholder's dreams and programmer's abilities. Here is a small overview on that.

1. Negotiations
for Product Owners
How to reach compromise – even if nobody wants one.
Warfare methods to use with Developers and Stakeholders

2. Alexandr Gribenko
Chief Product Owner @ LIGA
20000 business customers in Ukraine
Dozen products – six product owners
Web, SaaS, Mobile,
thin clients, fat clients on Windows & Mac.

3. Product Owners – often is the
ONLY ONE, who is really interested
in product release
«Product Owner – is an ONLY guy, who
REALLY understands how a product should
work and look like, while everybody else
does disagree with him.» - LIGA content
director

4. During negotiations
• Write it up – send annotation (use outliners)
• Rephrase, repeat, request to confirm – you’d be
surprised
• Draw as much as possible (doodle)
• Plan time ahead to discuss vision – often being
forgotten
• Use spelling to unite with the party - WE are
always on one, our (their) side
– Use WE, WE HAVE, IN OUR company, WE ALL would
suffer

5. Personalities
Never get personal
– Not "you", but - «me» or «John» or «a friend of
mine»
– Nobody like to admit being wrong or improper
behavior
– When we illustrate improper behavior we can’t
show it on other party – It’s better to talk about
ourselves (“once I made a bad choice”) or third
party (I can remember my friend / another big
company done that)

6. If it does not work - tactics
• People are afraid of change - propose to keep
everything as is, but add new features in
parallel and test later.
• Search for and propose compromises
• Hide behind authority (boss/customers)

7. If it does not work - actions
• Delay / Postpone / Dismiss / Re-Schedule meeting
• Split participants
– Reach compromise separately
– Take lead and decide yourself instead
• Appeal to experts and/or moderators
– Teamlead
– Scrum master
– Strategists / Architects
– «Experienced»
– Testers – they do know unexpected user behavior

8. Constructive style
• What exactly is wrong?
• How we can fix it?
• What is missing?
• What can we do about that?
• Write it down and ask again
• Use five whys method

9. Destructive style
(everything is bad/nothing would work out)
• Convert destructive to constructive
• If it didn’t work – exit conversation/ postpone
– best advice- take time to rethink
• You can decide without them, but
– They would be demotivated
– They would keep their opinion
– They would do it badly – is there a sense for that?

10. Questions?
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/agribenko
a.gribenko@gmail.com