Product Owners - How do we support them better?

Host: Bill Wake

Attendees: Kim Witchey, Mark Pushinsky, Chris Doss, Joe Little, Wim van de Goor, Pete Clark, Ronica Roth, Jiri Lundak, John Hill (yikes -- add your names...)

What are the challenges for product owners?

• The product owner is the tip of the iceberg - there are many stakeholders behind them.
• The product owner is circumvented - "is empowered but isn't"
• How to staff the product owner role? It's not a standard/defined role in organizations.
• The agile community tends to be developer-oriented.
• The product owner is partly next to the team, partly next to the business. Can it really be one person?
• Product owners are sometimes confused about what are their responsibilities.
• What are the patterns? e.g., single person, business analyst, committee
• Hard to be a single voice to the team.
• May have enough power but not enough time.
• How to improve communication between the product owner and the rest of the organization?
• Waterfall thinking - a fear of not getting everything if they don't ask for it all at once.
• Product owners feel a need to resolve a whole business case (in one chunk).
• Challenging to tie features to monetary value, especially incrementally.
• How to resolve conflicts between multiple product owners?
• How do we know what's enough to ship? Product owner may not be clear on where the line is.
• How to usefully break big things into smaller chunks? A critical skill to learn.
• Problems are systems problems. How to start small? How to work incrementally?
• Some product owners don't think they own the details.

What could we do?

• Create a list of responsibilities for the product owner - a product owner guide.
• Identify patterns of product owners
• Identify patterns for influencing product owners. (E.g., one-on-one coaching, mentoring, classes)
• Explore techniques useful to product owners. (E.g., how much to announce, how much to commit to publicly?)
• Identify traps - things not to do.
• Organize things into a values/principles/practices framework.

Then we broke into small groups, to discuss several sub-topics. These were:

Product Owner - Values, Principles, Practices

Product Owner - Traps, Things Not To Do

Product Owner - Patterns

 Create your own business wiki!HelpPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS