Hi João,
thank you for this very nice article.
I was previously working as a Product Owner for both internal products and external clients (within an agency model). I can relate with a lot of the points you make about the role of the Product Owner being undermined in certain situations.
However, from my experience, HiPPOs are certainly not exclusive to external client work. I had plenty of HiPPOs undermine my decisions as Product Owner when working for internal products. In fact, I think it was much more common for me when working on internal products than with external clients. I believe this is just a consequence of poorly educated and unprofessional people, or maybe of poor and outdated company values.
The company I was working for clearly didn’t had a set of values that was compatible with agile and lean processes (nor with a modern approach to management). On the other hand, some of the external clients I worked with had such a set of values, making it more viable to fully employ SCRUM in the latter context than in the former.
So while I relate to most of the things you mention in your article, I was a much more happy (and effective) Product Owner when I worked with external clients (through an agency model) than when I worked on internal products (in a standalone organisation). I think SCRUM effectiveness is not that dependable on it being employed in a an agency context or in a standalone product company context; it really depends on the specific context of the companies themselves.
