• Product Owner

My 2 biggest takeaways from the Product Owner Event 2025

On October 2, I was a guest at the Product Owner Event 2025, organized by ProductOwner.com. What a day! With a thousand participants, a carefully crafted program and an organization that was right down to the last detail, Jochem and his team can be justifiably proud.

Behind the sheen of this success, I also saw a field that is in flux. With opportunities, but also with growing pains and complex challenges. Of course, the rise of AI was mentioned several times: promising, but only of real value if the Agile basis is solid. This applies to both starting and experienced Product Owners. In this article I would therefore like to discuss two challenges that I saw in these two target groups:

1. Wobbly foundation among starting Product Owners
2. System limitations among experienced Product Owners

Wobbly foundation among starting Product Owners

The first group, starting Product Owners, is often full of enthusiasm but lacks a firm compass. Their biggest challenge? A lack of fundamental knowledge of Agile principles. Without a good understanding of the three pillars of Agile:

• If there is no transparency, what are you inspecting for?
• If you don’t inspect, what do you learn?
• And if you don’t adapt, how agile are you really?

On top of that, you hear complaints about the lack of:

• A stable team
• Real contact with business, users and customers
• Focus and clear priorities

In many cases, these Product Owners work in matrix organizations, with limited mandate, and project-based thinking (“we’ll cut the project into sprints”). But if customer feedback is missing and teams are not stable, that is not Agile working, but project management in iterations. And that is worrisome. Because that’s not how we really learn and deliver value structurally. What is needed:

• A solid training foundation, where Product Owners learn not only what Agile is, but more importantly why it works.
• Coaching and practical guidance to transform principles into behavior.
• And above all: mandate and confidence to take real responsibility.

Without that foundation, every sprint becomes a gamble and every roadmap a wish rather than a strategy.

System limitations among experienced Product Owners.

The second group, the experienced Product Owners, does have that foundation. They work with stable teams, clear visions and regular customer interaction. Their challenge lies elsewhere: the system in which they operate.

When the context becomes more complex (due to budget cycles, dependencies, or hierarchical decision-making), organizations still too often revert to command & control. That’s when you see:

• Mandate evaporates
• Customer contact is filtered
• Decisions are made top-down

The result? Motivated Product Owners become frustrated, teams lose ownership, and the organization’s agility evaporates. So the real challenge lies not in the teams, but in the system.

It was often said that the real added value of these Product Owners should not be in the Delivery piece (short of delivering stuff with a team), but should be on Discovery. Translating the organization’s strategic themes into value creation for the team. That means interacting much more with stakeholders, customers and users. Engaging much more with external entrepreneurial factors and interfering much less with the Scrum machine.

I can only agree, but that implies that the Product Owners must then have replaced their wobbly foundation with a solid one. Because if the foundation is not in order and Delivery comes under pressure, and the stakeholders are going to think something of it, then I know who (wrongly) becomes the head of the pack. Exactly, the Product Owner. So this means that the basic fundamentals and principles must be in place to be able to do Discovery.

My vision of how we can be there for these Product Owners

The gap between the two groups of Product Owners calls for two types of interventions.

Invest in foundations for entry-level Product Owners

• Knowledge of Agile principles
• Skills in stakeholder management
• Experience with customer validation
• A stable team and mandate to make decisions
  

Give experienced Product Owners room to change organizations

• Less focus on compliance, more on learning and ownership
• Scrum Masters as change agents rather than ceremony managers
• Management that dares to trust teams instead of wanting control

Only when we strengthen both layers can the profession of Product Owner truly mature.

In conclusion

The Product Owner Event 2025 showed that the profession is alive and well, but also that we still have a way to go. One half of Product Owners can make more impact by creating more grip, the other half by arranging more freedom. The future of our profession does not lie in even more frameworks or tools, but in strengthening knowledge, coaching and organizational change.