The term chief product owner is usually used to refer to the overall product owner of a large-scale product or a product portfolio manager, neither of which is a line management role. Impediments removal is not exclusively practiced by Scrum Masters. The impediments a head of product might help remove include a lack of effective product management processes and tools and lack of skills, for example, how to stock, prioritise, and refine a product backlog.

Leadership and self-organisation don’t contradict each other IMO. The opposite is true: Self-organisation requires the right type of leadership. I write about this topic from a product perspective in my book How to Lead in Product Management as well as in several leadership-related articles. If you are interested in line management and its relationship to self-organisation, then take a look at the following two articles:

• Mike Cohn, The Role of Leaders on a Self-Organizing Team
• Esther Derby, Control and Creativity

Hope this helps.

Thank you Roman for your answer. At first I thought it would come down to a “chief product owner” because it is not a “people lead” (whether Spotify or whatever). Then I read about removing impediments and creating the environment so I felt more reminded of the role of the Scrum Master.

My biggest problem arguably lies in the conflict of understanding a leadership role within a group of self-organizing teams. But the constellations in companies are so complex that there is probably that too …

Thanks for your comment Dieter. Product people, including product owners in Scrum, are commonly organised in a function called the product management group or team. The person who leads this function and looks after the product people is referred to as head of product (HoP). A chapter lead is a line management role that emerged at Spotify. If the product people form a chapter, then the HoP would be the chapter lead.

I don’t see a conflict with the Scrum roles. An effective HoP looks after the product owners, helps the individuals develop and grow, and acquire new skills; acts as an escalation partner when major impediments arise; and creates an environment in which the product owners can succeed and do a great job. I have seen companies which had professional product people but no HoP. But this meant that the individuals lacked support and found it hard to do their job well.

Hope this helps!

Your merging of “leadership skills” and “core product management skills” makes me fear that the role of the “head of product” leads to overlaps / conflicts toother roles in the context of Scrum and thus goes against the concept of “reduction of social complexity”.

Can you resolve this?
Regard

Dieter