Chapter 4
The Product Owner

Manager:

What do you mean the site is down?

In the United States, Cyber Monday is one of the largest online shopping days of the year. If your site is down on Cyber Monday, you’re losing money—a lot of it. The manager who made the comment at the beginning of this chapter worked for a worldwide retailer and was expecting a big holiday season for online sales. The website needed to be live and taking orders for the retailer to hit the forecasted financial targets. Learning that the site had crashed right before Cyber Monday was not a great way to start the day.

Todd started working with this company right after their Cyber Monday crash. He heard stories from development team members about competing interests between product owners. In talking to the business analysts, Todd found they were often stalled in their ability to make scope-based decisions, sometimes waiting days or even weeks to meet all four product owners for approval. Yes, you read that correctly: there were four product owners for one product even though Scrum stipulates a single product owner for a product.

The issues made a lot of sense. There were seven development teams led by four product owners. These product owners were all focused on getting their areas of the application ready for release. They initially created a road map outlaying scope, schedule, and budget. But that plan took a back seat to shouting matches between the product owners, who couldn’t agree on what to work on next. Nobody on the development teams truly knew where the product was going because it seemed to be moving in four different directions. Without a vision, the loudest voice (or the highest paid person) often filled the product leadership void.

For the company, this was an intense time and one for which it still bears scars today. The competing interests of the product owners were devastating. The development teams were not collaborative—in fact they were often at odds due to the many different directions the four product owners were trying to take them.

As Scrum masters, we work within our organizations to make sure that people understand the product owner’s role. A product owner must be empowered to be the final decision maker in order to bring the most value to our customers. We need to ensure that the organization understands why this is so important and that management gives the product owner the necessary authority. We need to tackle situations like our four product owners story above, and bring to light the flaws in that approach.

You work side by side with the product owner, helping to find new ways to be agile and successful. This may include suggesting ways to make the product backlog transparent, facilitating conversations between the PO and the development team, teaching new techniques for interacting with stakeholders, helping the PO understand their role on the Scrum team, or assisting in being transparent to the team and stakeholders about a value hypothesis the PO has formed.

Here are some important facts about the product owner role for you to keep in mind as you read this chapter:

• The PO role should be performed by one person per product, not a committee.

• The PO manages and is responsible for the product backlog.

• The PO works relentlessly to maximize the value of what the development team is working on by ordering the product backlog.

• The PO is in charge of creating and maintaining the product vision.

• The PO uses Scrum as a catalyst to inspect the product and adapt its direction based on customer and stakeholder feedback.

• The PO keeps tabs on the marketplace and adapts the product with it.

• The PO works with stakeholders to gather opinions and ideas, but is empowered to make final decisions.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the product owner anti-patterns illustrated by our Cyber Monday fiasco as well as others you should be aware of—and how to fix them. Our retail friends learned the hard way that a committee of product owners fails miserably. Hopefully you can use the lessons in this chapter to avoid similar situations in your workplace.