Common challenges for Product Owners

Scrum guide has few powerful statements about Product Owner role as mentioned below:

• The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. 

• The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management

• For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions. 

However, many Product Owners cannot perform the above activities properly due to several challenges they encounter in that role. This article covers few common challenges of Product Owners in the role and possible remedies to tackle those challenges:

1. Lack of time: When a Product Owner gets overwhelmed with many tasks on the plate, it is highly difficult to spare enough time for those tasks. Eventually the tasks get piled up and lead to delayed decisions, or wrong decisions type of situations. Sometimes Product Owners behave like micromanaging people and too much get into Team’s activities or try to spoon feed the team. This will eat a considerable amount of time of the Product Owner.

Remedy: Product Owner can delegate some of non-core activities to the Development team in order to keep quality time for critical activities. Prioritizing the tasks on a daily basis to identify the most important and critical tasks to be done on the top of the list will help to give enough time for those activities. Making the teams empowered and making them part of discussions will help the team to take up a few things on their own without coming back to the Product Owner for every small little thing.

1. Lack of skill: This is dangerous, something like keeping a person on the driving seat who does not know the driving. It may happen due to several reasons such as management forces the Product Owner to take up the role, or stakeholders select the Product Owners without having proper understanding of the person, or traditional project managers are tasked to take Product owner responsibilities without having deeper understanding. 

Remedy: Be courageous to tell if you feel you are not the right person to play the role. Instead of taking up the role without skill and fail at the end, it is better to highlight upfront. Try to keep some learning time to improve your domain knowledge by going through blogs, meet-ups, attending conferences and talking to people in Product Management. Doing certifications also will help to gain the skills that help you to perform the role effectively.

1. Pressure due to several products in hand: Sometimes organizations push the Product Owners to take up multiple Products to execute simultaneously. This will obviously lead to availability, accountability issues which lead to ineffective Product Ownership.

Remedy: Be clear to your management and explain to them what will be the possible consequences of taking up multiple Products simultaneously and how it impacts Product Development. What if you go to a salon and there is only one person serving 5 customers at a time? This will delay the value delivery to customers. It is okay if one Product is into maintenance mode and no major development activities are not happening, then you can take a new one in addition to the existing one with the same team(s) but if you try to execute multiple Product with peak development, it leads to suboptimal results.

1. Too many teams working with Single Product Owner: When Product gets into growth mode, there may be increasing demand for delivering more features and eventually it leads to adding more teams to work on the same Product Backlog. Eventually the Product Owner becomes a bottleneck in this situation. This leads to delayed decisions, availability of Product Owner to all teams becomes less.

Remedy: Try using scaling methods such as Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) and try to scale the Product owner role according to the guidelines provided by those scaling methods. Introducing events such as joint product backlog refinement, joint Sprint Planning, Joint Sprint Review may help to address this problem to some extent.

1. Fear of Stakeholders: Product Owners with lack of confidence, empowerment and domain knowledge face this challenge often. When they have to face Stakeholders they become “yes man” type and they behave like order takers instead of initiators. This situation will make Product Owners ineffective in their role.

Remedy: Try to categorize the stakeholders using some techniques such as power Vs influence. Understand that not every stakeholder is the same. Try to avoid managing stakeholders individually. Set the expectations at the beginning with Stakeholders. Involve Stakeholders often in critical events such as Sprint Review and also keep them updated with any important updates that enhances their trust up on you.

1. Poor Backlog management: Consider a situation of a refrigerator in your home which is dumped with all sorts of items in it, it leads to a situation of unmanageability. Very much similarly, if you dump all items into the Product Backlog, it becomes unmanageable and takes a considerable amount of time to manage it.

Remedy: Start practicing how to say “No” to stakeholders. Every request may not be important, valuable and urgent. So you have to set expectations upfront with stakeholders. Using proper backlog prioritization techniques such as MoSCoW, Importance Vs Urgency, Value Vs Cost, will help you to manage backlog effectively. Spend little time every week to look at the backlog and remove unwanted items so that the backlog does not become overwhelming.        

1. Forecast challenge: If you cannot provide forecasts on the timelines, budget to the management and stakeholders time to time, they might have questions on the progress and it leads to misleading information. It is okay to be roughly accurate than precisely wrong in terms of the forecast but you must be able to provide the information on time. This will help you also as a Product Owner to get additional funding or additional team members as and when needed. So not knowing how to measure the progress and forecast will lead to problems.

Remedy: Try to avoid pressuring your team so that they can maintain predictable velocity which helps you to come up with reliable forecasts. Using tools such as Release Burnup, Release Burndown, and cumulative flow diagrams will help you to make the forecasts effectively.

Conclusion: In order to be successful in the Product Owner role, and to address the above challenges, you should have Courage, Domain knowledge, Availability, Accountability, Empowerment, Effective communication and Passion. Continuous learning attitude also helps the Product Owner to grow in the career successfully.