Great Technical Product Owners LISTEN
And so do great product and platform engineering teams!
The most valuable training I’ve received in years was not in technology. It wasn’t even a so-calledd “soft skills” course. It was training to become a Samaritans Listener.
Listening, building empathy, establishing compassion and connection isn’t just crucial to my skills as a listener to people in crisis on the telephones (or in the prisons, or anywhere else I volunteer), it is a super power every single day at work as I try to understand my users’ needs.
Whether I’m building client-facing products, or internal developer platforms, the ability to actively listen, without judgement, is something I treasure. It helps me build better roadmaps, better product visions and missions, and better rapport with those kind users who give up their time to help me shape all of those things.
In my humble opinion the best way to learn and then practice Active Listening is to consider becoming a Samaritans volunteer. But if that’s too big an ask then I also have this free set of materials available to explore and start to practice Active Listening as a skill on your own. I intend to grow this set of materials into a useful, free collection on all sorts of collaboration skills for engineers and product owners, so raise a ticket on the repo if there’s something you’d like that’s not already there or on the roadmap.
It’s a favourite roll-eye quote in this industry to say there are only people problems. Well, if there’s any truth to that statement maybe we can change that a bit by creating some first-class materials for learning how to work better together. After all, tech is a team sport, so the better we play together the more successful everyone can be!
There must be good ROI in that somewhere ;)