Coach’s Corner

The product owner is accountable for maximizing the value of what the development team is working on. This person is the single decision-making authority regarding what gets built next. The PO works tirelessly to represent stakeholders and facilitate conversations between all the customers who use and consume the products the team delivers. Product owners explore the minds of the customers. They work with development teams to consider their opinions and understand the technical implications of each decision. All of this is stored in the product backlog that they meticulously manage and order.

For the product owner to be successful, he must be empowered to make all of this happen. This includes owning the budget, managing scope, and evaluating return on investment. It’s important that everyone in the organization understands why the product owner role is so vital in Scrum, and what could happen if that role were downgraded. Many organizations struggle with defining and empowering the product owner. Depending on the organization’s maturity, it might take a while for the product owner to be appropriately empowered.

How can you bring attention to the importance of this role in your organization? Work with your product owner to understand the depth of their interactions with stakeholders, the development team, customers, and management. Work together to create a Product Owner interaction map:

1. On a whiteboard, create four quadrants. Label them “Stakeholder,” “Customer,” “Development Team,” and “Management” (respectively).

2. On individual sticky notes of the same color, answer this question: “What interactions is the product owner having with this group right now?”. Place each sticky note in the appropriate quadrant. An example might be placing a sticky labeled “product backlog refinement” in the development-team quadrant.

3. On different color sticky notes, answer this question: “What interactions is the product owner not having (or not allowed to have)?” Again, place each sticky note in the appropriate quadrant. These items are impediments that are preventing your product owner from making value-based decisions. Why aren’t those interactions happening? What is the first course of action you can take to change this? In other words, what is the first impediment we can remove?

It’s up to you to figure out how to take action on these impediments and create change.

We’ve taken a look at the product owner role and seen some of the consequences of this role not being elevated to what it needs to be. Next, we’ll look at a subject that’s closely related: the product backlog. In this artifact, you may very well see symptoms of the anti-patterns we discussed in this chapter.