Product Owner pitfalls

I came across an excellent article about Product Owner pitfalls last week on InformIT, by Roman Pichler, titled: Agile Product Management with Scrum: Common Product Owner Traps and Pitfalls.

He lists several types of Product Owner failure mode:

• Underpowered Product Owner
• Overworked Product Owner
• Partial Product Owner
• Distant Product Owner
• Proxy Product Owner
• Product Owner Committee

You can read the details of each in the article.
 
Each one of these resonates with me, since while providing operational support in product management and development to the expansion stage software companies in our investment portfolio, I’ve seen each one happen.

Typically, the root cause of the issue has nothing to do with Scrum and or other methodology, but rather with the fact that earlier expansion stage companies do not view the product management function, where the Product Owner resides, as a high priority, stand-alone empowered role, and certainly not enough to invest the time and money, and for the founding CEO or CTO / VP Development to give up control of their product (it’s their baby!).

And if the senior founders make enough of a leap to hire and empower one Product Owner, they’re certainly not excited about hiring support staff or allowing the Product Owner to focus just on one thing, which leads to a number of the pitfalls described above.

I find that once senior management makes the mental leap around the role, all else flows from that.