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From Staying in Your Line to The Connected Product Owner—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize | Gunnar Fischer
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Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"This Product Owner didn't need to be the smartest person in the room, but everybody knew, okay, this is a really smart guy." - Gunnar Fischer
The best Product Owner Gunnar ever worked with was what he calls the connected PO. This person had a deep professional network—inside the company and with the customer—and could talk to anyone: a colleague, the client, a brand-new team member they were onboarding. They were socially sharp without being shallow. They could disagree clearly, even harshly, and then turn around and say, "now let's talk about something else," with kindness. When this PO said no, it was a no people respected; when they said yes, it was a yes people trusted, because everyone knew the PO could push back. The praise behind their back matched the praise in the room. They had a private life, too—not married to the job, which made them a more well-rounded human. But the specifically Product Owner skill Gunnar names is this: they could look at the product across different time horizons—what does it need to do in one month, three months, one year—and they kept juggling functionality, contracts, customer situation, and economic reality at the same time. Their technical background helped, but they understood the line: "It's not my job to be the technically most savvy guy, but I'm willing to share my knowledge with everybody." As Gunnar puts it, the difference between a subject matter expert and a Product Owner is that the Product Owner makes the information flow.
Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner make information flow across the team, the customer, and management—or are they hoarding context as the "expert"?
The Bad Product Owner: The Stay-in-Your-Line, Accept-Your-Fate PORead the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"You manage the backlog, you do the customer calls, you write the user stories—but you were not involved in any of the bigger decisions." - Gunnar Fischer
The anti-pattern Gunnar sees most often isn't malice—it's resignation. Most Product Owners aren't given the access or the permissions they need to be successful, and so they accept their fate. They manage the backlog, take the customer calls, write the user stories, sometimes talk to management—but they aren't part of the bigger decisions: ROI on a feature, whether to build it at all, the product vision a year out. Management keeps those decisions to itself, and the accept-your-fate PO doesn't challenge that arrangement. They stay in their line. They don't push back when sales drops in an urgent request that ruins the plan. They don't challenge the developers when an estimate feels wrong. They become very protective of the things they can control—their privileges, their processes, th