Thanks for your comment Hanna. You are absolutely right: You can divide a larger products into parts and assign an owner to each part, as I have described in my post Scaling the Product Owner.

It’s certainly possible for teams to share their PO. But there’s also nothing to stop multiple products, and their clear owners, from being aggregated into a larger product which also has a clear owner. Each collaborating team could thereby have its own PO.

Hi Patrick, Thanks for your comment. I can very much relate to your experience. I have seen a number of product owners struggle with balancing the strategic, market-facing and the tactical, development-facing aspects, and I have noticed that there are two common causes.

Some companies wanted to become agile but did not change their innovation approach and still required extensive upfront market research and product planning including detailed business plans. This put considerable strain on the product owners and is not inline with an agile, experimental approach that uses working software to discover user needs. At other organisations, the development teams and internal stakeholders did not support the product owners enough. Developers expected perfectly crafted, crystal clear user stories; management expected status reports and detailed plans.

Introducing the product owner role without changing people’s mindset and without changing the development system is not going to be successful in the long run.

The problem with what you suggest is that there is just no way for a PO to spend enough time in the market to absorb the knowledge and skill set necessary to articulate strategy and effectively communicate it across the organization. As long as the POs primary focus is keeping the development team fed full of the information they need, all the other roles become secondary and insufficiently represented.

I tried to straddle this fence for over a year before we concluded that it just wasn’t enough to have one person doing both. After missing too many sprint kickoffs while onsite with customers or attending tradeshows, we concluded that collaboration between prod mgmt and dev’s team-focused PO was necessary. Prod mgmt owns roadmap, PO owns sprints, and we meet in the middle to coordinate and launch a release.

Thanks for your comment, Roger. You are absolutely right: If one person makes all the product decisions, then some of the decisions are likely to be suboptimal or wrong. That’s why single product ownership must be complemented by collaboration, as I’ve mentioned in my post.

However, if nobody plays the product owner role and the development team collectively manages the product, there is a danger of not paying enough attention to the user needs, the user experience, and the business model, but too much attention to the technical solution.

Furthermore, healthy teams can operate just as efficiently in decision-making and more effectively in execution.

Check my blog entry on who really should own the product.