Agile Growing Pains – Making the product owner role work in a fast growing enterprise
Posted on February 12, 2010
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From my organization’s Product Owner land, we have many people participating in the individual tasks and requirements of the Agile Product Owner role from an engineering and product management perspective, but, no one person has taken it on, nor has the organization fully figured out how to embed the role. I keep scratching my head about why this is so hard, but clearly, it has it’s challenges. Internally, I view this as a process lifecycle and growth social artifact. In our process lifecycle, we’ve adopted Scrum, we are agile in our engineering execution efforts, we do release planning (note to self, this is another blog I could go off on), we have short release cycles and quick iterations, and we plan to re-plan often. We’re certainly not perfect, but we are committed to continuous process improvement and delivering incremental product value to market early and often. But, this APO social artifact has still not found a home.
Interestingly enough, we have clearly defined the role and organizational need as follows:
Position Summary
Wanted: Qualified Product Owners who will work with our product management and engineering teams to deliver products, on time. The Product Owner will have responsibility for engineering project management and product completion.
Responsibilities:
- Tracks internal cadence and delivery of engineering projects
- Drives engineering iteration objectives
- Provides day-to-day tactical objectives, and provides quick, JIT decisions to system level questions and defect triage.
- Works with engineering to decompose business stories into system level stories and/or designs.
- Manages the iteration and cross project tasks and dependencies
- Drives acceptance testing
- Prioritizes the iteration and defect backlog grooming and management
- Delivers the iteration
Experience requirements:
- Excellent project delivery skills, with at least 5 years experience participating in winning engineering projects
- Excellent communication and technical skills.
- Must have proven work experience as an technical “influencer”
- Scrum or XP Process-like experience in organizing and motivating teams to succeed.
- Ability to work in a dynamic and flexible environment
There it is, in a nice, concise job description. But, clearly, it’s not that easy. Here are some of our APO social artifact adoption challenges and possible mitigation strategies:
| Challenge | Mitigation Strategies |
| Engineers want a direct tie to Product Managers to ask detailed feature questions. Don’t want an APO in the middle. Product Managers don’t have time and are externally focused |
Hire within. This role needs to be a trusted entity who can carry the requirements forward on the business organization as well as be a technical leader in the engineering organization who can make the detailed implementation decisions on behalf of the Product Manager. |
| Yet, another management layer. Who needs that? | Perhaps true. But what better way to ensure product delivery and JIT decisions that increase velocity and decrease time to market? |
| Engineering wants Product Management to be more involved. Product Management is building a strategic/outward facing organization in order to grab those market opportunities. |
Growing pains! Again, lack of trust in the APO role. Never had one before! FUD factor. Hire within and have the APO live the dotted line. |
| Product Management thinks engineering should absorb the APO role. Engineering thinks Product Management should absorb the APO role | Someone has to! Don’t get stuck on where this role lives within the business. The reporting lines should be dotted throughout the organization. The need is there regardless of where it lives in the organization. |
| Strong personalities throughout the organization are tough to negotiate. No one within the organization wants the role or the encompassing responsibilities. It seems too big, too hard. | Yes, it is hard. And, good ones are hard to find. The APO needs unrelenting negotiation skills, engineering empathy and respect, and yet have the ability maintain business prowess. He also needs to be “Switzerland”, and not visibly take sides, rather be a cross-team leader while continuously balancing business requirements and engineering scope. No wonder the position isn’t filled  |
Perhaps a more logical adoption path for a start up moving from a technology-driven organization to a market-driven strategy would be to build the Product Owner role as the predecessor to the Product Management role. After all, most technology companies start in an R&D phase, and then move into the product and marketing phase. Funding the Product Owner role before the Product Manager role would enable the Product Owner adoption early and fill the gap. The next obvious position to fund in an organization’s lifecycle would be the Product Manager role as initial R&D winds down, and product markets open up.
But, we live for change, plan to re-plan, and continuously improve. Our APO social artifact will become a full-time role soon, I’m sure.
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