Great product development emerges from strong partnerships between Product Owners and developers. Ask developers what makes those strong product partnerships click, and you’ll hear three consistent themes:
We’re Better at Discovery Together Than Apart
Product development involves lots of uncertainty—in legacy systems, in user behaviors, in technical approaches. The most effective PO-dev partnerships embrace this uncertainty together, adapting their approach based on how much they know.
When uncertainty is high, these teams don’t pretend otherwise. For exploratory work, they time-box their discovery and use what they learn to make better decisions. For well-understood features, they can plan more precisely. Sometimes requirements evolve as learning happens. That’s not failure—it’s progress.
This often starts with a conversation like: “We’ve learned from our research that customers struggle with X. We think we can help them by doing Y, but we’re not sure about the best approach. What’s a small slice we could build that would teach us about the technical implementation and how users might respond?”
Your Context Helps Us Make Better Technical Decisions
Development teams make dozens of small technical decisions every day. When they understand the customer problem, business goals, and product strategy, they make those decisions in ways that better serve the larger purpose.
The most effective POs know how to share this context without taking up too much developer time. They schedule focused refinement sessions, share clear customer stories, and trust the team to handle much of the technical discovery independently. A good rule of thumb: developers might spend about 5% of their time (on average across a team and over time) engaging with future work while focusing most of their energy on current delivery.
Small Wins Matter, But Only When They Add Up
Developers love making progress. Shipping code, solving problems, delivering value—it’s energizing. But that energy comes from seeing how each piece fits into a larger picture.
The most effective product partnerships don’t just break work into small pieces—they show how those pieces build toward meaningful outcomes. They connect each feature back to customer value. They remove things that don’t serve the larger purpose. When the backlog becomes just a list of small requests, motivation suffers. When it tells a story about making customers’ lives better, the team comes alive.
Your Turn
Want to strengthen your product partnerships? Next time you bring work to your team, try starting with: “Here’s what we know about the customer need, here’s what we’re still figuring out, and here’s where I think we could really use your expertise in shaping the solution.” You might be surprised how energizing that kind of collaborative discovery can be.
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