The Lost Product Owner

At scale, the “Hero-Scrum” paradigm falls apart.  A product becomes too large for one team, then the number of teams becomes to large for the Product Owner & CEO model to work.  A company working toward agile transformation could slowly restructure toward mini-CEOs; but the truth is, the organizational switching costs are too high to make this a realistic option.  Be honest – those that own the customer relationships and those that own the technical communication are, respectively, too specialized – and great at their jobs – to start mashing them together as peers.

That said, I see a clear skew in agile transformation consulting and especially entry-level Scrum training toward protecting the team against the more powerful Product Owner.  While this may be a tactical prejudice when the role is played by your boss, my first-hand experience has been the opposite.  In scaled transformations, the more likely scenario is that Business Analysts,  Project Managers, Jr. Product Managers, Quality Assurance Analysts, or Support Engineers of the organization are asked to rise to the occasion and somehow, instantly and powerfully, lead a team to greater autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

{inspirational anthem plays in here}

Let’s be real.

The two fundamental hero images intrinsic in most Scrum courses – the ever-vigilant, time-protective ScrumMaster and available-part-time, drunk-with-power Product Owner – is meaningless in the more complex patterns of large organizations.

After studying LESS, SAFe, and Lean Enterprise theory, while speaking to representatives or directly working with several dozen organizations, it is clear that there are enough job title “Product Owners” that more attention to the profession (in separate consideration from the role) is a worthwhile pursuit.

Although I initially wanted to pursue the shock value of entitling my first book AGILE IS DEAD: HOW TO GET WHAT YOU MEANT YOU WANTED – it is plain to me that the audience for that book is too poorly defined, the pain is therefore not shared by the entire audience, and the text would be a fantastic (agile) train wreck.

Instead, I can see there is a compelling need to teach the lessons many of us learn the hard way then become agile coaches and lose touch with.  There is a very large guild of professional Product Owners that need hands-on tactics for not only how but why specific practices work well in an agile, lean, scrum setting (as part of a larger enterprise).  Amazingly, many of the hardest questions for running agile trains have analogs with well-established practices in professions and industries so antithetical to innovative software development that we all collectively forgot to look (and our executives understandably would never pay the handful of thought leaders who were looking to come give us a PhD in the topic).

So be on the lookout for the table of contents, the rough-draft blog posts, and the invites to MeetUps and workshops.  I’d love to hear from you on the topic in advance of those things – so reach out to me at andrewthomaskeenermba@gmail.com

Photo via Jaxon Stevens