How in the world is this article trending on DN??? Title is totally misleading and the content is just a poor sponsored post with 0 relevance to Designers. What a waste

As a designer I've been working with Product owners for a good amount of years now. I'd say, from my perspective, that it boils down to 3 things:

• Work process
• Regular communication
• Documentation

Work process is pretty much understanding how each other's daily routines look like, what are the team goals and how we optimise our relationship so we have the right expectations and hopefully build empathy from one another

Regular communication is key for getting work done and to reduce noise. If you work at a physical office, try to sit next to your PO. That helps to understand their daily activities and speed up your feedback loop. If you work remotely sharing everything is key, and regular catch-up calls are appreciated.

Documentation is something most companies don't do well. Either pre-project (project briefs) or post-project (learnings and next-steps), documentation can help you not only to be on the same page as POs but also record the learnings and decisions for posterity. In today's fast paced, A/B test driven companies, documentation is highly underrated and I truly believe that building good documentation together is a powerful tool for the PO/designer relationship and also for knowledge sharing.

I think the support part mostly comes from empathy and clear understanding of each other's processes. Enabling designers with the right information at the right time is something POs can do better than anyone.

I'm curious to see other people's responses to this very good question.