A Tale of Two Product Owners

software delivers. This is particularly true for regulated environments like finance, healthcare, telecom where products have to constantly adapt to changes in the marketplace. This is a lot more similar to the Entrepreneurial Culture.

Behavioral Anti-patterns

bull;ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Low or No engagement with development team ( Power Culture )

oÿÿ Spread too thin to commit to release level goals

oÿÿ Not being able to define, prioritize and schedule the product backlog

oÿÿ Inability to remove bottlenecks with other integration partners

oÿÿ Hand-waving and bluster[ix]

bull;ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Low or No engagement with strategy team ( Process Culture )

oÿÿ Inability to define product roadmap ndash; all stakeholder inputs are not baked in

oÿÿ Product feature set not aligned with market realities

bull;ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Un-empowered Product Owner ( Role Culture )

oÿÿ Decisions are overridden by other department or peers

Conclusion

Agile methods are intended to bring individuals working together in a more intimate environment than other methods. Agile also espouses self-empowered, self-starting teams controlling their own environment. It requires a different kind of skill and attitude to manage agile teams working in which is more often than all a contradiction (in terms of responsibility and authority) for traditional product managers to absorb. It is however the responsibility of the Product Managers, especially in start-up-like environments, to understand the underlying principles of agility and map them into effective practices that fosters a collaborative culture. As some people would say, ldquo;You can get the code right, you can get the products right, but you need to get the culture right first. If you don't get the culture right then your business won't scale.rdquo;[x]

References

[i] lWhere the jobs are..; http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2040964-2,00.html

[ii] {Link broken}

[iii] lDon't create a culturer; Page 249, Rework by Jason Fried David Hansson

[iv] www.learnmanagement2.com/culture.htm

[v] http://www.learnmanagement2.com/culture.htm

[vi] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_culture

[vii] http://www.entrepreneurship.org/en/resource-center/creating-an-entrepreneurial-culture.aspx

[viii] http://managementhelp.org/org_thry/culture/culture.htm

[ix] Rich Mironov -  The Agile Product Manager/Product Owner Dilemma  

[x] ThoughtWorkers who took time to review and provide constructive feedback for this article