Why Measuring Your Product Bets Is the Key to Product Owner Success | Njegos Ilic

Njegos Ilic: Why Measuring Your Product Bets Is the Key to Product Owner Success

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes .

 

"If you cannot measure what you build, you will just be depending on who is screaming the loudest and using your gut feeling — which is not a good thing long term." - Njegos Ilic

 

Njegos defines product owner success through three pillars: the ability to measure product bets, deep knowledge of the industry and product, and the humility to admit mistakes and be challenged. The measurement piece is central — without it, he argues, you're flying blind, making decisions based on opinions rather than evidence, reacting to whoever screams loudest rather than what the data shows. But Njegos is honest that not every environment makes measurement easy. Some companies lack the tooling, the culture, or the historical infrastructure to set up proper analytics. In those situations, he turns to user interviews as the next best thing — getting direct feedback from users, even though he acknowledges that opinions are still limited without data to fact-check them against. His most powerful suggestion: invite the whole team to user interviews, not just the product trio. When developers hear directly from users, they connect to real-world problems, and conversations during refinements become richer and more grounded.

 

In this episode, we refer to The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick and Shift: From Product to People by Michael Dougherty and Pete Oliver-Kruger .

 

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