The Three Product Owner “No”’s

Saying “No” is the most important job of the product owner. It’s really the reason d’etre for this role. But there are lots of different ways and reasons to say “No”. This is my stab at categorizing three important “No”’s a product owner can deliver.

A typical SCRUM backlog, colors imply different projects or feature areas. All images by the author.

I still like the definition of a product owner as “if you’re responsible for building a product in a company using scrum, then you’re a product owner.” Or to say it with the words of Melissa Perri Product Owner is the role you play on the SCRUM team. Product Manager is the job!

Henrik Kniberg has a great way of explaining the works of a product owner in simple terms. He highlights the reason that the product owner must exist lies in the fundamental conflict between:

1. We want to stay agile, have really short cycles between input & output.
2. We have way more requests for a development team than they can handle.

The SCRUM way of resolving this conflict is to put a “product owner” in front of this queue, and let him say “No” all the time, then prioritizing the items in the queue to enable really fast cycle times.

Here are my favorite three “No”’s. Ask yourself “wherein our backlog/queue would…