product strategy Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Karim Harbott: From Requirements Documents to Customer Obsession—Redefining the PO Role

The Great Product Owner: Strategic, Customer-Obsessed, and Vision-Driven

“The PO role in the team is strategic. These POs focus on the customer, outcomes, and strategy. They’re customer-obsessed and focus on the purpose and the why of the product.” – Karim Harbott

Karim believes the industry fundamentally misunderstands what a Product Owner should be. The great Product Owners he’s seen are strategic thinkers who are obsessed with the customer. They don’t just manage a backlog—they paint a vision for the product and help the entire team become customer-obsessed alongside them.

These POs focus relentlessly on outcomes rather than outputs, asking “why are we building this?” before diving into “what should we build?” They understand the purpose of the product and communicate it compellingly.

Karim references Amazon’s “working backwards” approach, where Product Owners start with the customer experience they want to create and work backwards to figure out what needs to be built. Great POs also embrace the framework of Desirability (what customers want), Viability (what makes business sense), Feasibility (what’s technically possible), and Usability (what’s easy to use). While the PO owns desirability and viability, they collaborate closely with designers on usability and technical teams on feasibility.

This is critical: software is a team sport, and great POs recognize that multiple roles share responsibility for delivery. Like David Marquet teaches, they empower the team to own decisions rather than dictating every detail. The result? Teams that understand the “why” and can innovate toward it autonomously.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner paint a compelling vision that inspires the team, or do they primarily manage a list of tasks?

The Bad Product Owner: The User Story Writer

“The user story writer PO thinks it’s their job to write full, long requirements documents, put it in JIRA, and assign it to the team. This is far away from what the PO role should be.” – Karim Harbott

The anti-pattern Karim sees most often is the “User Story Writer” Product Owner. These POs believe their job is to write detailed requirements documents, load them into JIRA, and assign them to the team. It’s essentially waterfall disguised as Agile—treating user stories like mini-specifications rather than conversation starters. This approach completely misses the collaborative nature of product development.

Instead of engaging the team in understanding customer needs and co-creating solutions, these POs hand down fully-formed requirements and expect the team to execute without question. The problem is that this removes the team’s ownership and creativity. When POs act as the sole source of product knowledge, they become bottlenecks.

The team can’t make smart tradeoffs or innovate because they don’t understand the underlying customer problems or business context. Using the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility-Usability framework, bad POs try to own all four dimensions themselves instead of recognizing that designers, developers, and other roles bring essential perspectives. The result is disengaged teams, slow delivery, and products that miss the mark because they were built to specifications rather than shaped by collaborative discovery. Software is a team sport—but the User Story Writer PO forgets to put the team on the field.

Self-reflection Question: Is your Product Owner engaging the team in collaborative discovery, or just handing down requirements to be implemented?

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About Karim Harbott

Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.

You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.

Renee Troughton: Analytics From Day One and Four Other Principles of Great POs

“Product owners who think about their products as just a backlog that I prioritize, and I get some detailed requirements from stakeholders, and I give that to the team… that’s not empowering the team. And it’s probably leading you to building the wrong thing, just faster.” – Renee Troughton

The Bad Product Owner: The Backlog Manager Without Vision

Renee describes a pattern of Product Owners who don’t understand product management—they lack roadmaps, strategy, and never speak to customers. These POs focus solely on backlogs, prioritizing detailed requirements from stakeholders without testing hypotheses or learning about their market. Taking an empathetic view, Renee notes these individuals may have fallen into the role without passion, never seeing what excellence looks like, and struggling with extreme time poverty. Product ownership is one of the hardest roles from a time perspective—dealing with legislative requirements, compliance, risk, fail-and-fix work, and constant incoming demands. Drowning in day-to-day urgency, they lack breathing space for strategic thinking.

These POs also struggle with vulnerability, feeling they should have all answers as leaders, making it difficult to admit knowledge gaps. Without organizational safety to fail, they can’t demonstrate the confidence balanced with humility needed to test hypotheses and potentially be wrong. The result is building the wrong thing faster, without empowering teams or creating real value.

Self-reflection Question: Are you managing your Product Owners’ workload and supporting their strategic thinking time, or are you allowing them to drown in tactical work that prevents them from truly leading their products?

The Great Product Owner: Analytics from Day One and Market Awareness

“They really iterated, I think, 5 key principles quite consistently… the one thing that did really shape my thinking at that time was… Analytics from day one.”

Renee celebrates a Chief Product Owner who led 13 teams with extraordinary effectiveness. This PO consistently communicated five key principles, with “analytics from day one” being paramount—emphasizing the critical need to know immediately if new features work and understanding customer behavior from launch. This PO demonstrated deep market awareness, regularly spending time in Silicon Valley, understanding innovation trends and where the industry was heading. They maintained a clear product vision and could powerfully sell the dream to stakeholders.

Perhaps most impressively, they brought urgency during a competitive “space race” situation when a former leader left with intellectual property to build a competing product. Despite this pressure, they never allowed compromise on quality—rallying teams with mission and purpose while maintaining standards. This combination of strategic vision, market knowledge, data-driven decision-making, and balanced urgency created an environment where teams delivered excellence under competitive pressure.

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About Renee Troughton

Renee is one of the most experienced Agile coaches in the Southern Hemisphere with over two decades of transformation experience across banking, insurance, pharma, and real estate. Since 2002, she’s helped organizations go digital, tackle systemic issues, and deliver value faster. Passionate about cutting bureaucracy, Renee champions a return to humanity at work.

Follow Renee’s work at AgileForest.com, her website as well as her work on the Agile Revolution podcast.

You can link with Renee Troughton on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Marcelo Calbucci reveals Amazon’s secret innovation framework that transforms product development!

In this BONUS episode, we explore “The PRFAQ Framework” (visit also the website) with author Marcelo Calbucci. He shares how Amazon’s innovative approach to product development can be adapted by founders, product managers, and teams across industries. Learn how this powerful methodology creates alignment, clarifies vision, and ensures customer-centricity in product development.

The Origins of PRFAQ

“I learned the PR FAQ method at Amazon and realized this is a great tool that would be valuable for founders and product leaders.”

Marcelo Calbucci shares how his experience at Amazon introduced him to the PRFAQ framework—a structured approach to product ideation and development. He explains how this methodology transformed his thinking about innovation and why he felt compelled to share it with a wider audience through his book. The framework addresses a critical gap he observed in how teams approach product development, often lacking the clarity and customer focus needed for success.

Understanding the PRFAQ Framework

“PR FAQ stands for press release and frequently asked questions—it’s a method to talk about and define a vision for the product.” Continue reading BONUS: Marcelo Calbucci reveals Amazon’s secret innovation framework that transforms product development!

Global Agile Summit Preview: Unifying Strategy, Discovery, and Delivery in Product Development With Roman Pichler

In this BONUS Global Agile Summit preview episode, we explore a crucial topic that’s shaping how we approach product development—sometimes in ways that serve us well and sometimes in ways that hold us back.

There’s a growing trend in our industry to explicitly separate strategy, discovery, and delivery into distinct activities or even different teams. On the surface, this seems logical: strategy decides the right thing to do, discovery figures out how to do it, and delivery gets it done. But is this division actually helping us? Or is it creating barriers that make great product development harder?

The Origins of Product Discovery

“I think it’s partly based, at least on Marty Cagan’s work, and his insight that many teams are very much focused traditionally on delivering outputs, on writing code. And I think his original intention was to say, ‘Let’s not worry about creating outputs. Let’s also make sure that what we creating makes sense.'”

Roman Pichler shares insights on how the concept of product discovery emerged as a reaction to teams being overly focused on outputs rather than outcomes. He explains that conceptually distinguishing between product strategy, discovery, and delivery can be helpful—much like organizing clothes into different sections of a wardrobe. However, in reality, these activities must be connected, informing and guiding each other rather than existing as sequential steps.

The Risks of Separating Product Strategy, from Discovery, and from Delivery

“If we have a group of people who takes care of strategic decisions, a different group focusing on product discovery, and another group—the tech team—who focuses on product delivery, and those groups don’t talk as much as they could and should do, then suddenly we have a sequential process and handoffs.”

One of the primary challenges with separating strategy, discovery, and delivery is the risk of creating handoffs between different teams. Roman highlights how this sequential approach can slow down value creation, lead to knowledge loss, and increase the likelihood of introducing mistakes. This separation can create barriers that ultimately make product development more difficult and less effective.

In this segment, we refer to the podcast interview with Tim Herbig on the concept of Lateral Leadership, and how that is critical for product people.

Integrating the Work Streams

“What I usually use as a visualization tool is three work streams: a strategy work stream, a discovery work stream, and a delivery work stream. The strategy stream guides the discovery stream. The discovery stream guides the delivery stream, and then the delivery stream informs the discovery stream, and the discovery stream informs the strategy stream.” Continue reading Global Agile Summit Preview: Unifying Strategy, Discovery, and Delivery in Product Development With Roman Pichler

Substack Week: AI in Product Management, Enhancing Product Development Through Artificial Intelligence with Toni Dos Santos

In this Substack Week episode, we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming product management with Toni Dos Santos, co-author of The Product Courier newsletter. From automating routine tasks to enhancing strategic decision-making, Toni shares practical insights on leveraging AI to build better products faster and more efficiently.

From Music to Banking to AI Product Management

“I wanted to work in that area to find ways to put innovation to service to the consumers, and making it as invisible as possible.”

Toni’s journey into AI and product management began in an unexpected place – the music industry. After working as a music producer, his interest in innovation led him to banking, where he discovered the untapped potential of data analytics. His experience working with machine learning and deep learning in banking laid the foundation for his current work with generative AI in product management. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked his deep dive into applying AI to product management challenges.

Revolutionizing User Story Creation with AI

“User stories are a big pain for many product managers, particularly junior ones… The idea is that you provide the AI with a PRD or description of the product, and it’s going to write user stories based on best practices.”

Toni explains how AI can transform the process of writing user stories by automating the initial drafting while preserving the essential collaborative aspects. He emphasizes that while AI can handle the mechanics of writing, the real value comes from using it as a springboard for deeper discussions with the team. The technology can suggest edge cases, highlight potential gaps, and provide a structured foundation for further refinement.

AI as a Tool for Understanding User Needs

“Use all the transcripts, the feedback from user interviews that I have, feed it to AI and retrieve from it the key pain points, the major patterns that it identifies.”

Continue reading Substack Week: AI in Product Management, Enhancing Product Development Through Artificial Intelligence with Toni Dos Santos