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product owner role

Here we go again, picking on the poor Product Owner

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Here we go again, picking on the poor Product Owner

Joshua Kerievsky recently wrote a post entitled Eliminating the Product Owner role. As of December 3, 2018, it had received 766 likes and 162 comments on LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/eliminating-product-owner-role-joshua-kerievsky/

The opening premise of Joshua’s article is here:

Before I get into who or what would replace the PO role, let me offer a bit of background on this group. Three coaches, including myself, had assessed this group prior to beginning work with them. Our findings were typical:

  • Too much technical debt was slowing development to a crawl

  • There was insufficient clarity on what needed to be built

  • The developers spent little time with their Product Owner

  • The team was scattered around a building, not co-located

  • etc.

When you perform numerous assessments of teams or departments in many industries, you tend to see patterns. The above issues are common. We've worked out solutions to these problems eons ago. The challenge is whether people want to embrace change and actually solve their problems. This group apparently was hungry enough to want change.

So, springing from this problem statement, Josh makes the point that if you: 

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Product Owners – Are you “Happy”?

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Product Owners – Are you “Happy”?

In his latest newsletter, Len Lagestee wrote about Even Happier Product Owners. The piece shared 9 conditions of happiness for the Product Owner. Here’s a link to the blog post.

And here’s the list:

  1. They are immersed with their customers;
  2. They have the time and space to be visionary and creative;
  3. They have true ownership over their product;
  4. They are receiving meaningful feedback about the performance of their products;
  5. They have a positive working relationship with their Scrum Master;
  6. They have an even better relationship with technical leads and designers;
  7. They are proud of what the team is delivering;
  8. They have embraced their constraints;
  9. And, they are keeping themselves healthy.

I really like Len’s list as a baseline for the happiness and performance of the Product Owner role. I’d like to compare the list against my 4-Quadrants of the Product Owner role model.

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