I was taking a lunchtime swim last week. I was the only person in the pool. It was quiet, calm and it gave me time to think as I trundled up and down each 25m length.
This popped into my head, and as part of my fresh start I thought it was a good one to get into my blog.
One of the most useful blog posts I read after I started at DWP was this one about naming things by @BeksVB.
And it got me thinking – if we really want agile delivery teams to be truly user-centred, do we need to think about renaming some of the job titles in the team?
Not that a job title means much to some people, but I think it does help pin some kind of responsibility and direction to the people in those roles.
The one that got me thinking to start with was the role of the Product Owner (PO) or Product Manager (PM).
I’ll say to start with I’m fortunate to work on a service where our POs fight for the user. They’re also accessibility and service standard champions. But I’ve also seen situations where that isn’t the case.
Working on a government service, I’d argue that the PO doesn’t ‘own’ the product, the users do. In fact, that could be the case for some services outside of government.
So what do we call them?
My intention is to open this up to a workshop with the DWP Content Design community, but I’d had some thoughts on the role of the Product Owner or Product Manager.
Are they more of a Product Custodian? Or even a Service Custodian, if they’re responsible for an end-to-end service and not just a product.
Custodian, from the Oxford English dictionary:
A person who has responsibility for taking care of or protecting something.
Obviously, there are other words that could be used instead, but it feels to me this change sets out a clearer responsibility to make sure a service or product meets user needs, rather than a remit to make design or development decisions without considering user needs.
I think there’s a lot to chew on, here, so rather than have a go myself I’ll take it to the community and write a follow-up with what we find.
In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts in the comments below.