In this episode, we challenge you to think about what is needed beyond a great PO to be able to help the Agile teams succeed. We also discuss how the planning practices in some companies actively destroy product ownership.
The Great Product Owner: What we need beyond a great PO
Is a good Product Owner enough? Do we really need the PO role? These are some of the thought-provoking questions we tackle in this episode. We explore ideas from Lean Startup, Customer Development and mention the book Rethinking Agile by Klaus Leopold.
The Bad Product Owner: How corporate planning destroys product ownership
The Product Owner is one of the hardest roles in Agile and Scrum. Tomo starts by sharing aspects of the PO role that are often forgotten or ignored. We also discuss the dynamics that often push PO’s to only focus on managing their backlog, and miss the impact of having a clear direction / Vision for the teams.
In this segment, we refer to the Beyond Budgeting movement, which tries to bring Agile ideas and practices to the finance departments of large and mid-size organizations.
Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Tomo Lennox
Tomo has 20 years of experience in project management, both waterfall, and Agile. A few years ago he was at David Anderson’s first Kanban Conference and has been a fanatic ever since, even though he has lost several jobs as a result of it. Tomo became then an advocate for projection over guessing, and reactive planning.
You can link with Tomo Lennox on LinkedIn and connect with Tomo Lennox on Twitter.
