No Part-Time Product Owner

The dark side of not investing in a product owner

Article originally published at www.scrumalliance.org.
You can find the original article here.

Let me tell you about my experience working without a true product owner. At my company, we all heard that implementing some of the Scrum practices didn’t mean that we were implementing Scrum. We also learned that the only way to win stakeholders’ approval was to run a few sprints and let the product speak for itself.

That’s all well and good, but be careful. In fact, I think your team should ask itself what it will be able to do in those few sprints if the stakeholders are not convinced at all about Scrum. Of course, you can start with a training session for businesspeople who are new to the Scrum framework. This is exactly what we did, in the hope of guaranteeing a common background to build upon. The problem is that after the initial training sessions, you either win or lose the customer. And if you lose the customer, what you get is something like, “OK, that’s great! Feel free to do that Scrum thing in the IT department, and deploy new features every two weeks.”

This doesn’t feel like your business manager considers herself really involved in the process! Actually, it feels like there’s a lack of understanding the basics of what we’re talking about. But that’s just it — it’s a seismic change in mindset that occurs over time. In our case, this perception had not been pronounced explicitly in this flavor, but the meaning of all our talking and compromises sounded very much like it.
You can read the full article here: No Part-Time Product Owner