Product Owner Empowerment

When establishing a new product organization, one of the most important things to get right beyond your product itself, is choosing the right Product Owner to lead your product. The Product Owner role is critical to the success of your product and is also one of the most complicated to fill. A great Product Owner understands their market and customers, as well as their products & processes. They need to have the ability to influence in order to get things done.

Successful Product Owners typically have skill sets that range beyond subject matter expertise in their product & industry, including Business Analysis, Project Management & strong leadership. If you are fortunate enough to find someone who has all of these skills, including deep product subject matter expertise, the best thing you can do is empower them to drive their product forward. I have seen companies that do this very well, and they have had great success with their products. Unfortunately, I have seen companies that did not provide this type of empowerment and set not only the Product Owner up to fail, but the product as well.

While coaching a product organization through an Agile transformation, I helped define their products, and prioritized which product would be first to shift to this new way of working, including identifying a Product Owner. I will say that the person they selected was the most qualified candidate from within their organization. This person had been working in their industry for many years in various roles, had a wealth of knowledge & experience, and understood what their customers were looking for and expected from their products. The Product Owner knew their pain points, as well as what would elate them if they had an opportunity to deliver it. They were a leader in the organization, not only in title, but through their actions & interactions with the team.

Select the right Product Owner: A

The Product Owner role is a full-time job and is not something that can be done well as a side project. This means not only selecting the right person to lead your product, but also to free them up to focus and do the job well. Sometimes you get lucky and the person is already able to do just that. But sometimes you need to move them from their current role into the Product Owner role. This is not always easy to do, but necessary for success. This company also made the right decision to fully move the new Product Owner out of their current role in the organization, and into the Product Owner role. They had an official transition to the new person that took over their previous role so there was no confusion, or temptation to have them ‘cover’ both.

Dedicate the Product Owner to the role: A

The next thing organizations need to get right is surrounding the Product Owner with a knowledgeable team that fills and enhances any gaps that the Product Owner may have. Product Development is a team sport, it takes many skill sets & perspectives to create and maintain a product. This can include other subject matter experts, specialists, business analysts, etc. While Product Owners own the final decisions on what does or does not go into a product, they do not always have all the answers or ideas.

Having a great support team offers a better chance of success. This group allowed the Product Owner to identify and form their Product Team, taking subject matter experts that would be able to contribute to the backlog based on their areas of expertise, filling in any gaps the Product Owner may have had.

Support Product Owner with Product Team: A

We now had a dedicated Product Owner with a Product Team. Our next action item was to get them together to ensure we were all on the same page about the existing flow, identify improvement opportunities, and then prioritize them. We held a Journey and Story mapping session that produced a great framework that we could use to guide the development of our Product Backlog. There was just one problem…a few of the key people needed to form the development team based on the items identified would now not be available as expected. They were still needed to wrap up their previous project that was taking longer than scheduled.

Align a dedicated Product Development team: D

Not only did this cause the momentum the team had been building to grind to a halt, but it also allowed time for politics to creep in. The Executive Leadership Team (ELT) met on a quarterly basis to discuss all things that impacted the organization, including the transformation of one of their products to a completely new way of approaching work. This would normally be good; however, the Product Owner was not invited to the table to discuss the progress being made, or any challenges being faced. This update was passed up 2 levels to the existing ‘correctly leveled’ person that currently had a seat at the table. This meant the information was twice removed from where it originated, may have been misunderstood, and it would travel one way. There was no good way to have a real conversation about how it was going, and what was needed to continue to move forward. It was a flat status update that became the first sign that things were not going as well as we thought. Decisions would be made at the table that would be passed down to the Product Owner. This was an ‘Agile in the Trenches’ mentality that did not go all the way through the organization.

Adjust from Top Down Mentality: D

The next challenge our Product Owner faced was a tug-of-war with the PMO leadership. As most of the organization was still project driven, this product should have sat outside of that structure, however the PMO still wanted to be heavily involved, including approving anything the Product Owner wanted to prioritize for the team to work on. Our Product Owner was now caught in a classic ‘PO by committee’ common pitfall. They no longer had autonomy to make product decisions, strategic or tactical. This not only created a large amount of waste in the process for decision approvals, it created a morale issue for the team. They were now in a position where they couldn’t rely on the Product Owner to provide direction, as they knew it could change as it went up and down the chain. And worse, the Product Owner became reluctant to provide direction for the same reason.

Provide Trust and Empowerment to the Product Owner: F

Agile is not a new way to deliver projects and is not something that lives only at the team level. To truly embrace the mindset of becoming an Agile organization, it requires buy-in at all levels. This organization came out of the gate strong, and yet ultimately failed their Product Owner where it mattered most. To get the most from your products and Product Owners, you need to do more than choose the right person, you need to show them that you believe they are the right person for the job, and empower them to do it. This typically requires a change in organizational thinking and a move from standard hierarchical decision making. When you make the move from project to product focus, do not fall into the trap of thinking this is a change that exists in a vacuum.

Be ready to make real change to achieve real success.