Multiple Product Owners May Remove The Chances of Success
Many people calling the shots make inefficiency and mediocrity inevitable.
It was the end of the year, and I was excited to plan the roadmap for the next quarter. Unfortunately, I was unaware of the nightmare, which was just about to start.
We were three Scrum Teams and three Product Owners. Until then, I used to believe that one Product Owner per team should work. But after four long hours of useless discussions, I concluded that multiple Product Owners for the same product cause massive inefficiency beyond increasing the odds of falling into a feature factory pitfall.
Despite having three Scrum Teams, we worked on the same product, and we even had a shared Product Backlog. Yet, somehow we couldn’t agree upon a single direction. Each Product Owner wanted to take a different road. Beyond that, we were component teams, which made the dynamic even more complicated, since we could not achieve our goals alone. We needed to collaborate and handle the dependencies.
The hard truth is that we planned the roadmap full of compromises, dependencies, and frustrations. Each Product Owner had a different opinion of what mattered the most. No need to say, but our quarter was a disaster.
