Is your Product Owner actually a product OWNER?
Oftentimes, they are not
The Product Owner has a crucial role in Scrum. They are accountable for maximizing the value of their product. But is your Product Owner actually accountable for the entire product?
Most Product Owners I know are something else instead. They are one of the following:
Feature Owners
They are accountable for maximizing the value of a product feature. They work on an element of the product that fulfils user needs but can’t function on its own. Feature Owners may be able to maximize the value of their feature, but have no control over the other features that together provide the complete product experience. So a user may be happy with a product feature, but unhappy with how features work together and therefore unhappy with the product as a whole.
Component Owners
They are accountable for a distinguishable part of the product that often can’t function without other parts. Examples are the database, the front end, and reporting. Components typically don’t fulfill a specific user need so a Component Owner can’t meet their most important accountability of maximizing the value of their component on their own.
Team Owners
Team Owners are accountable for the delivery of the product parts by their team. They are working with a team backlog that is a subset of the program backlog. These are typically Product Owners in a SAFe environment. Team Owners have no control over value creation. They are ensuring teams deliver according to plan, hoping this will increase value.
Product Owners that are one of the above are Product Owners in name only. They aren’t solely accountable for the value of the product.
What is the big deal? Well, in the end, it is all about maximizing the value of the product. And when the accountabilities of the product are fragmented over multiple Product Owners and their teams, this has an impact. Who is watching over the product value? The key is realizing you are in this situation and actively working on resolving the issue.
There’s no immediate fix to solve all problems that may arise from having fragmented Product Owner accountabilities. But some key elements are:
Having a clear goal for the product as a whole. In Scrum, this can be a mutual Product Goal.
Alignment and collaboration. LeSS or LeSS huge comes to mind. But I also have great experiences with a Product Owner team. Blasphemy in the church of Scrum, but when it works…
Engage the users and other stakeholders in the complete product experience. One way to do this is by having one Sprint Review with all teams working on the product and their stakeholders. This, by the way, is also what Scrum recommends.
I did not even talk about the Product Owner vs Product Manager debate. This is another can of worms. But regardless of how your organization deals with this, it should all be about product value maximization.
Original article March 2023
There is also a tricky people element involved: Product Owners in name only are on a dead-end track regarding their professional development. They do not learn what they need to. At the same time, what do you do if you realize that you would go better with less people with the word product in their job title? I would always leave options to look for other jobs in the company; unfortunately, what is written under the guise of Product these days is very harsh to people in general. A pity!