The Pwned Product Owner
The concept of ownership in engineering is as itchy as it gets. I am not talking about ownership in the literal sense of the word (possessing something), but talking about engineering ownership as the Agile geniuses have predicated for decades. The Scrum Guide1 defines a Product Owner the following way:
The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals. The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes:
Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal;
Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items;
Ordering Product Backlog items;
Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood.
The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.
For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions. These decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review.
The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the needs of many stakeholders in the Product Backlog. Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince the Product Owner.
Some things from that excerpt above make sense. I mean, every product under development should have clear goals and a planned evolution, like a roadmap. A bucket list doesn’t hurt, does it? You wanna call it a bit fancier than that? Ok, backlog it is.
Equivalently, every product needs a “funnel” between business and engineering, filtering what makes sense to add—or remove—versus what does not. All in all, the backlog seems like a good thing, and if the PO can both handle the backlog and the funnel, that’s actually not bad.
But here’s a fundamental problem: there are two kinds of ownerships, and they are in constant friction. There is an “artificial” ownership and a natural ownership. With artificial ownership I mean that there is a bureaucratic, forced kind of ownership, where a higher-up unilaterally assigns someone to be the owner of thing X. This arbitrary ownership collides with the natural ownership that those who have developed and shaped the damn thing—and therefore know it by heart—understandably feel entitled to wield. Who wouldn’t feel a moral ownership for their own creations?
Nothing worse than randomly christening artificial owners with shallow knowledge about the product and have them go and try to exercise their role only to find they in fact own absolutely nothing and instead have been massively pwned2 by the power of those who have fathered the product and have the domain knowledge to actually call the important shots.
An artificial owner cannot really touch the Product Backlog or do much with it other than some harmless bookkeeping or some innocent things here and there, because any serious reshuffling would require navigating through the dependencies and intricacies of the tasks involved, which are naturally owned by the domain experts; pushing item B before item A could be technically unfeasible because the design process may dictate item A needs to be done first. Real story: once, a PO asked if a PCB layout could be pushed earlier in a sprint than the schematic capture, to the amusement of all engineers in the meeting. And that’s that; when the Product Owner comes and asks such an absurd thing, revealing they have no insight on the underlying technology they are supposed to “own”, the respect is lost forever.
In most cases, artificial owners are left as representatives of the interest of certain stakeholders, and are tasked with the ungrateful endeavor of negotiating with the natural owners when and how certain things could be expedited a bit, if possible. Artificial product owners are often reduced to be mere backlog maintainers whose main persuasion technique might be the best puppy eyes they can display to get something out of the engineers.
Maybe it’s a naming thing. Had the Agile fathers named these roles in a bit less cocky manner, things could have been maybe a tad different. But no, everyone must be a master, an owner. Had the Product Owner be called Product Facilitator, or Product Helper, their existence would have been a bit easier. You can’t own what you have no clue about.
The word "pwned" has its origin in video game culture and is a leetspeak derivation of the word "owned", due to the proximity of the "o" and "p" keys in a keyboard. It's typically used to imply that someone has been controlled or dominated.