Describe a time you helped your stakeholders or business partner understand a technical need.
Product Owners are responsible for setting the priority of the product backlog. This includes weighing the needs of important stakeholder requests against technical priorities. Interviewers ask this question to determine how a candidate might interact with future stakeholders to show them the value of investing in technical requirements.
Interviewers want to be sure a candidate can coach their clients and assist them in making educated prioritization decisions. Remember to include any supporting detail you offered to outline the value of addressing the technical need when walking your interviewer through the points you made in the scenario described.
I worked on a solution that tracked the money and time spent on various work tasks for my business partners. They needed a new report for analytical purposes and asked me to move the related stories to the top of the backlog. The development team informed me that the technology we had been using for reports was obsolete and that we needed to find a new solution and test it with one of the current reports before developing something new.
My stakeholders were unhappy with this plan, but I explained why it made sense to experiment with the smallest scope possible. I explained that replicating an existing report would serve as a proof of concept that could be easily and quickly tested because we already had the basic design and data queries.
We agreed to test the new tool with an existing report and develop their specific requirements for the new report while they waited. I also worked with them to run database queries as a stop-gap until their report could be developed. This process gave the development team time to address issues that came up while learning the new tool, and the development of the new report went smoothly.
