#41 How product owners in Agile can learn from sales to improve product success, with Vasco Duarte.

Welcome to Episode 41 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. It is such a pleasure to have Mr Vasco Duarte on the show with us today. Vasco helps companies generate customer-centric products and get their processes to a level of performance they thought was impossible. Vasco does this by focusing product development teams on the end-to-end life-cycle of their products. From Concept to Cash and Back!Vasco is the Author of the book "No Estimates" and daily podcast host at the Scrum Master Toolbox. Vaso gives back to the community every day to improve the IT and product industry worldwide. Proudly brought to you in association with S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.Product owners can get better outcomes by engaging with sales. Vasco is training product owners to start with their customer's vision for the product, rather than their own or their company's vision. One of the advantages that product owners get from engaging with sales teams is hearing their customers language. The wrong type of interaction - sales led development without the whyVasco talks about interactions between salespeople and product owners. The wrong type of interaction is when a salesperson says, "Here's the list of features you need to develop for my customers".  The right type of interaction - collaboration and engagementThe salesperson could be a great source of insight for the product owner.  Great product owners will engage the salesperson to understand the context around that list of features: why are they being requested?Salespeople have an incredible mindset in intuitively understanding the customer's business model. Vasco believes that when a product owner can tap into this mindset, they can amplify the customer's business model. But, unfortunately, the majority of the products out there are a burden on customers. They impose tasks or models on the customer rather than help them succeed. Key TakeawaysFocus on how we can serve - Focus on serving other teams in our business as well as external customers, establishing a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement and innovation.Minimal viable experiment - provides a simple, fast way to test our theories on how we can improve and learn from this. The MVE concept is about developing the minimal viable approach to product development or improvement to share with a customer and gain their thoughts and feedback. Quotes16:05min There's only one phrase in your customer's mind. And that phrase is there all the time. And the phrase goes like this. What have you done for me lately? And they ask that question from your product every single time they interact with your product. And your product needs to shout that answer all the time. What have you done for me lately? Right? And, of course, it has to be designed with that question in mind, right? We don't add features to a product. We solve problems for a customer.LinksBrad - Brad is proud to support many Australian businesses. You can find him on LinkedIn here. If you’d like to speak to him about how he can help your business, call him on 0402 448 445, or email [email protected]. Our website is www.bradjeavons.comVasco - LinkedIn and the Scrum Master Toolbox.To learn more about what we do, visit https://enterpriseexcellencegroup.com.au/Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.