The Great Product Owner: Proactive Preparation Before the Team Asks
“Before the team asks, you know that this is the prerequisite for this user story.” – Pankaj Kumar
Pankaj’s example of a great Product Owner is someone who did the homework before meeting the team. This PO understood what the team needed to deliver, prepared the acceptance criteria, talked to UX early, and made sure design inputs were available before developers were blocked.
Vasco describes this as “preparing the ground” for the team. The PO was not just pushing features into a sprint. He was listening to what the team could achieve, translating stakeholder needs into clearer work, and reducing waiting time so the team could focus on execution.
For Scrum Masters, this is a useful pattern to notice: great Product Owners protect the team’s flow by handling communication and dependency work early.
Self-reflection Question: What does your Product Owner prepare before the team discovers it needs help?
The Bad Product Owner: Pushing Urgent Work Into an Already Full Sprint
“The team was already having everything on the plate, and they can’t take any more.” – Pankaj Kumar
The anti-pattern Pankaj highlights is a Product Owner who treats urgency as permission to ignore capacity. In one sprint, a PO arrived with an important customer case and insisted that it had to enter the current sprint backlog. The team was already overloaded, but the PO was not ready to hear the tradeoff. Pankaj’s advice is to slow the conversation enough to make the real decision visible.
Why is this urgent?
Who is the stakeholder?
What is the risk?
What is the impact?
Can it wait until the next sprint? If it cannot wait, what will be adjusted?
Agile welcomes change, but change still has a cost. A Product Owner who says yes without making the tradeoff visible risks damaging trust with the team.
Self-reflection Question: When urgent work enters the sprint, what does your team explicitly remove or renegotiate?
Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Pankaj Kumar
Pankaj Kumar is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach with over 18 years in IT. He helps teams adopt Agile ways of working, improve collaboration, remove impediments, and deliver value consistently. He facilitates Scrum ceremonies, coaches teams and stakeholders, and supports Agile transformation across organizations.
You can link with Pankaj Kumar on LinkedIn.
