What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. Jane Goodall
Today I realized that I don’t even want my team to deliver the product if it’s crap. Maybe that makes me a bad product owner.
Let’s take an example. If I worked for Coca-Cola as the product owner for a line of bottled water, sold in throw-away plastic bottles that are clogging the ocean and killing our world, I would literally stop the presses until we had a plan to stop the bleeding. “Coca-Cola produces more than 100bn throwaway plastic bottles every year” and it and other brands are hostile to using recycled plastic for cosmetic reasons. (Guardian)
So if I did that, would it reduce our profits? You bet it would. I’d get fired. I hope I would have the courage to stand up and do that.
Maybe I’m just bad at my job.
But I don’t think so. Here’s what I think: good products are in the business of providing solutions for customer needs. And if in the process of solving a customer problem, you are actually killing that customer, or killing their children, or ruining the world so they can’t breathe or eat any more — hey, that is not a a solution. Clearly I’d like some nice fresh clean water. At the same time, I do not need to ingest a pound of plastic pellets every time I eat fish. I absolutely don’t need to kill all of the polar bears either.
The only way you can get away with this kind of short-sighted product design is to lie to your customers or to withhold critical information that is to their detriment.
A good solution to a customer product is not one that immediately, short-sightedly solves just that problem without regard to context. The right solution is the one that solves the problem and long term, all things considered, either makes the world better or at least doesn’t destroy it.
So yeah, call me bad. And while you are doing that, please stop buying bottled water. And stop asking your development teams to deliver crap that looks good now, and hurts later.