An often missed aspect of Product Ownership is the fact that it is mostly teamwork. That a team can bring a lot of input to the solution definition if they are able to interact with the Product Owner. But there is a dark side to this realization: when the PO is absent, or unable to justify the requirements… We discuss these anti-patterns, and why teamwork is so important when it comes to Product Ownership.
The Great Product Owner: Product Ownership is teamwork
In this segment, we talk about how the Product Owner role is not really only the Product Owner’s responsibility, but that the nest Product Owners are able to work together with the team to answer the question: “What is the minimum solution that fulfills this need?”
The Bad Product Owner: The Pass-through Product Owner
Sometimes, Product Owners act as mere channels for requirements. These “pass-through PO’s” convey the information they collect elsewhere but are often unable to share the reasoning for their ideas with the team, which leads to poor quality requirements, poor quality implementations, and a lack of collaboration with the teams.
In this segment we also refer to the “ghost PO”, a Product Owner that is present only in planning and in the review but is mostly absent, not being able to interact with the team to clarify questions and help the team fine-tune the implementation with early feedback.
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Dimitri Favre
Dimitri is a business, transformation, and agile coach and a repented project manager. Dimitri works side by side with executives, managers, and teams to uncover better ways of developing software and delighting customers.
Dimitri is the author of a recent book, on the topic of #NoProjects: Live Happily Ever After Without Projects: A #NoProjects book.
You can link with Dimitri Favre on LinkedIn and connect with Dimitri Favre on Twitter.
