You're at odds with product owners over IA decisions in an agile setting. How will you find common ground?

Start by understanding their concerns and explaining the benefits of your IA choices. Identify shared goals, be open to compromise, and use data or examples to support your points. Organize collaborative workshops, agree to test different approaches, and use real user feedback to guide decisions. This collaborative approach helps align both parties toward common objectives.

When there's a tension, the first thing to do is meet the person 'where they're at'. So probably acknowledging it and agreeing to work together to find the way forward. A way to quickly find the common ground to get started is through the company values. Those usually have something that you'll both agree on. Then with the shared perspective revisit the tension. This will help you both reframe it through a common lens and better understand the other view. Then maybe it'll make more sense to you -- or maybe they'll see the issue in a new light.

The first and foremost thing to do is to go back to the roots of the problem. What's the problem you are trying to solve? If you conducted any user interviews/surveys, what was feedback that was received? Then with the help of Product Manager/Product Owner try to understand the key objectives and goals in order to align the IA decisions. Collectively identify the most important IA items and then set up a cadence to brainstorm, co-ordinate and collaborate to solve the problem together.

Finding common ground with product owners over Information Architecture (IA) decisions in an agile setting involves several key strategies: Understand Their Perspective: Begin by understanding the product owners' priorities, concerns, and objectives. Communicate Clearly: Use clear, non-technical language to explain your IA decisions. Highlight how these decisions support the overall project goals, user experience, and long-term scalability. Collaborate and Involve: Involve product owners in the IA decision-making process. Use Data and Evidence Showcase Benefits Compromise and Flexibility: Be open to compromise and flexible in your approach. Regular Updates and Feedback Focus on End-User Impact Build Trust

The answer is simple - what’s in the best interests of the customer? What are customers telling us and how do we translate that to an IA that works best for customers? Instead of a product owner vs technology tussle, this should be 100% about what’s going to create the most value for customers.

On top of presenting the data produce an interactive POC showing that the idea will actually work. With high level libraries and interactive environments it’s easy doable within a sprint.

Considering that historically users are often unable to describe the need or the problem but rather what they expect from a solution, the use of Generative AI is an excellent option. It can generate new data and scenarios that have not yet been explored and, in most cases, have not even been visualized. It allows you to describe problem scenarios and generates data that is fed back into the AI itself to identify and create new scenarios that users may not have even imagined. This speeds up the identification and resolution of demands that have not yet been noticed, despite being present, bringing efficiency and increasing operational effectiveness.

In other words: go to empowered product teams. Embrace all their values and principles and make sure your processes and IT enable these values.

Before you do that define success metrics. Track them over time. Revisit them and redefine them as needed. This will enable data driven decisions according to the objective results. Eliminate speculations and subjective opinions. Use elasticity and pivot according to metrics collected from production. Still everything within empowered product teams principles. Do not reinvent the wheel. Aim for action, not opinions.

I’ve always found that the liberal use of profanity is always appropriate when artificial intelligence is under consideration. We definitely could use more profanity in the workplace when discussing bad ideas.