Background

Product ownership – beyond saying no

Derk-Jan de Grood is an Agile transition coach at Squerist. He’s supported organizations like ING Bank, RTL, DPD, Nationale Nederlanden and Greenchoice in their Agile transformation. He’s also an experienced trainer, workshop host and regular speaker at conferences. On his blog, he shares his knowledge and experience for everyone to benefit. This year, he published his 8th book, “The waves of Agile,” which deals with value delivery in medium and large organizations.

Reading time: 6 minutes

For many years, Derk-Jan de Grood has regarded the ability to say no as one of the most important skills of a good product owner. The power to say no seems to be an indication of product owner maturity. But that’s not the end of the story.

The advantages and mechanisms making single-team Scrum effective are challenged when applied in larger organizations. There, we often see that new epics and features are pre-determined by programs and scopes defined outside the product owner’s span of control, and short-term intitiatives interfere with longer-term planning cycles. Product owners need to grow in their role and take ownership. The more mature they get, the better they operate in the complex, multi-layered environments of larger organizations.

Product owner maturity

There are several models of product owner growth. In my book “The waves of Agile,” I follow Robbin Schuurman’s article “Growing as a product owner: five product owner maturity levels.” These five levels are: scribe, proxy, business representative, sponsor and entrepreneur.

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