The scrum Product Owner – a contemplation about the role to unleash the self-organizing team on the path of meaningful contribution
In the scrum context, the Product Owner role is accountable for the impact of the “what”, while the team is accountable for delivering the committed “what” and is empowered to choose the “how”, i.e. the means.
Contemplating on the role of the Product Ownership, inspired by SME a missunderstood PO a product owner being the expert in one field can easily invite her into playing into the “how” with the consequence of undermining the empowerment of the team. This results in a lack of effectiveness as the team is relying on the expertise of the PO, while the PO herself taks away the focus from the long term vision, ROI and other parts of their work.
What is the purpose and work of the PO role?
The PO is responsible for finding the right ‘what’ which creates the desired impact .
What is the desired impact? And how can it empower teams?
The impact in the most commonly shared paradigm of business, objective achievement focused – orange organisations (Reinventing Organisation F. Laloux) is measured to be successful by financial numbers. My belief is that impact could be much more holistically understood by enhancing this paradigm of evaluating impact with the ideas from Barret and the 7 stages of organisational development. By including customer satisfaction, quality & excellence, collaborative synergy and purpose, i.e. meaningful contribution, we would tap into the higher levels of consciousness of organisations.
I believe those categories give a much more holistic model for building an impactful vision which can seed the strategic backlog building. It is a holistic model tapping into the intrinsic motivations of wo/mankind reflecting on D. Pinks work, Drive.
What is the work of a PO? How does it empower people, purpose and teams?
The PO is a facilitator and holder of a common vision built upon purpose. Purpose means impactful contribution to something bigger than ourselves (free by Viktor Frankl). The purpose will drive impact leading to wide synergistic collaboration, “customer” satisfaction, quality & excellence and result in revenue. (free by Jim Rohn: “You only have to focus on giving and the receiving will solve itself.”)
This meaningful vision will tap into the deep intrinsic motivation of making a difference and helping. By being focused on the potential, doors will open and create expanding space for the team, stakeholder, the whole community to creatively ideate with solutions to actualize it.
This, I think perfectly describes the role of the PO in more detail. The PO is a role focusing on listening in into the system around the purpose; This system are the people who are in the beneficiaries of the purpose, the teams as passionate servants to the purpose, the community of people who want to contribute and to the organisation including the PO himself. Key practices are listening and facilitation to evolve the meaning and its manifestation via dialogues and tests. The courageous sharing of the vision and its beliefs is needed to unleash the greatest potential.
As being accountable for the impact of the “what” and responsible for the ordering of the “what” in bound cadence iterations, it is a crucial skill to facilitate this created potential into an ordered “backlog” which can be immediately executed. The backlog items are to be created by the collaborative effort of the system. The system participants seed and share their ideas. The ideas are refined and collectively ordered by impact, certainty and the teams input to effort and feasibility.
I believe it is a continuous process of facilitation and never an autocratic mandating of the PO, despite of the PO being ultimate accountable. It can be understood as continuous using the advice practice, i.e. ask all relevant people and expert but the decisions is yours alone (this key practice is more in depth described in ” Reinventing Organisations” F. Laloux ) for building the backlog by taking and refining the “best” assumptions first.
The modern management slogan “Get out of the way and trust the team to build it” could be good for PO to describe their expected behavior for the iteration work of the team.
The team produces deliverables, which are making the desired impact or creating seeds for creating impact. The key role of the PO is to validate the assumption in collaboration with the system and evolve its purpose. The validation will lead to conformation of the assumption, great impact and awakened learnings in a shifting grey scale.
Good practices for enabling better dialogues are manifesting the vision of how success looks like? and when do we know we make an impact?. These practices allow to share, build a common understanding, potential, a more objective and from the ego decoupled possibility to learn.
It is essential to be able to decouple the ego’s needs to be able to serve the evolving purpose with abundance. This in my view unleashes the inspiration and motivation of the people to put a dent into the universe (free by Steve Jobs). Our relentless drive will make us all tap into our infinite creative potential feeding our eternal growth and transformation.
The need of being self-aware, conscious, curiosity, prestige less serving for the practicing the PO role in excellence, sets quite the standard.
Summing it up the PO role is facilitating:
A continuous cycle of evolving purpose and its manifestation
Listening, sharing, dialogue-ing, facilitating synergy, evolving purpose and vision, facilitating next “what” steps, trusting the people, learning, refining, listening…
How do you feel about this description of a PO role?
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