Episode Details

Karim Harbott: From Requirements Documents to Customer Obsession—Redefining the PO Role

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The Great Product Owner: Strategic, Customer-Obsessed, and Vision-Driven

"The PO role in the team is strategic. These POs focus on the customer, outcomes, and strategy. They're customer-obsessed and focus on the purpose and the why of the product." - Karim Harbott

Karim believes the industry fundamentally misunderstands what a Product Owner should be. The great Product Owners he's seen are strategic thinkers who are obsessed with the customer. They don't just manage a backlog—they paint a vision for the product and help the entire team become customer-obsessed alongside them.

These POs focus relentlessly on outcomes rather than outputs, asking "why are we building this?" before diving into "what should we build?" They understand the purpose of the product and communicate it compellingly.

Karim references Amazon's "working backwards" approach, where Product Owners start with the customer experience they want to create and work backwards to figure out what needs to be built. Great POs also embrace the framework of Desirability (what customers want), Viability (what makes business sense), Feasibility (what's technically possible), and Usability (what's easy to use). While the PO owns desirability and viability, they collaborate closely with designers on usability and technical teams on feasibility.

This is critical: software is a team sport, and great POs recognize that multiple roles share responsibility for delivery. Like David Marquet teaches, they empower the team to own decisions rather than dictating every detail. The result? Teams that understand the "why" and can innovate toward it autonomously.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner paint a compelling vision that inspires the team, or do they primarily manage a list of tasks?

The Bad Product Owner: The User Story Writer

"The user story writer PO thinks it's their job to write full, long requirements documents, put it in JIRA, and assign it to the team. This is far away from what the PO role should be." - Karim Harbott

The anti-pattern Karim sees most often is the "User Story Writer" Product Owner. These POs believe their job is to write detailed requirements documents, load them into JIRA, and assign them to the team. It's essentially waterfall disguised as Agile—treating user stories like mini-specifications rather than conversation starters. This approach completely misses the collaborative nature of product development.

Instead of engaging the team in understanding customer needs and co-creating solutions, these POs hand down fully-forme