• Product Owner

The 5 types of Product Owner you don’t want to become

Let me tell you this right away: as a Product Owner, you are not a conduit to (product) management. In doing so, you are doing yourself far too short. After all, what do you actually “own”? A list? To do’s? Interests of management? I have never heard of a List Owner or ToDo Owner. Yet this is a pitfall I often encounter in practice. In this blog, I discuss 5 of those pitfalls of Product Owner types you don’t want to become.

Let’s get this straight: you, as Product Owner, have a crucial role within Scrum. As owner of the product, it is your job to get the maximum value out of the product and the Scrum Team. Yet this is exactly where things tend to go wrong in practice: many Product Owners fall into anti-patterns that get in the way of team effectiveness and also value creation.

The 5 pitfalls of a Product Owner

In a previous blog I already wrote about the antipatterns of a Scrum Master, but so in this blog I share with you 5 antipatterns/traps of a Product Owner. In which do you recognize (parts of) your role as a Product Owner?

1. The micromanager
If you, as Product Owner, set yourself up as a manager, you often want to determine at a detailed level how the team works. You specify not only what needs to be done, but also how. This undermines the team’s autonomy and motivation and leads to frustration.

2. The Absent PO
You’re hard to reach, you rarely attend events, and you prefer to let the team figure out for themselves what’s important. The result? A backlog with no clear priorities, incorrect assumptions and a team that picks up work at random.

3. The Flooded PO
As a Product Owner, you do wear a lot of hats, such as that of project manager, team lead or marketing manager. Therefore, you have very little time for your real role; you have Product Owner as a side job. This leads to a backlog that lags behind and a team without clear direction.

4. The order-taker
As Product Owner, you simply do what stakeholders ask, without making strategic choices. As a result, the team constantly changes direction, there is no clear vision and the backlog becomes a collection of separate requests.

5. The proxy PO
Sometimes, as a Product Owner, you become a conduit for decisions from higher up, without having any influence yourself. This happens, for example, when a manager or other stakeholder actually manages the backlog.

What kind of Product Owner do you want to be?

What type of Product Owner do you recognize yourself in and what do you want from that? What steps do you want to take? Feel free to let me know and contact me. Or schedule a sparring session in my calendar. Of course you can also read this blog first, in which I elaborate on the 6 types of Product Owner you do want to become.