The Great Product Owner: The decision maker that saw themselves as an ally to the team
Great product owners don’t necessarily start with a long experience in the PO role. The example Jan shares with us is a person that had a senior position in the company, but did not have experience as a Product Owner. Yet, this PO had a sense for the team’s space and allowed the team to make decisions on their own. When his decision was necessary, he was ready to make that decision “on the spot”, to help the team move forward, and he never blamed the team for something he would have decided. This PO was a real ally to the team.
The Bad Product Owner: The anti-collaborator PO
When PO’s don’t collaborate, or don’t want to collaborate with the team, and see themselves as an outside entity, they end up destroying the team’s ability to perform. In this segment, we also discuss how the communication style of this PO led the team to feel powerless, leading to a worse product in the end.
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 Jan Neudecker
Jan is an Agile Coach and Trainer. His vision is to make workplaces more humane, enjoyable and purposeful. An unpleasant diagnosis three years ago had a big impact on how he looks at these topics today. It became his mission to get these topics more into the spotlight of teams and organizations so they are less of a taboo subject in future.
You can link with Jan Neudecker on LinkedIn and connect with Jan Neudecker on Twitter.
If you want to know more about Jan’s fight with cancer, you can follow his blog.
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