YDS: Does the Product Owner Come from the Business or IT?

Today's question is from a viewer who wants to know if a Product Owner should come from the business side of the company or from IT. Todd and Ryan discuss the role of the Product Owner and how the business vs IT mentality does not often lead to great product management.

What do you think? Does a Product Owner come from the business or IT? Let us know in the comments! Want to learn more about Scrum?

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[marymiller]

Our situation is more there is a PO for the Business and a PO for IT each with a different set of executive layers, and each in different locations. Although the Business really does a lot of IT. It makes managing projects (they are still project oriented) rather interesting at times. I kind of like the smaller problems that seemed easier to tackle.

[Monroecheeseman]

Bingo, if you can find a person from either IT or business to have enough time to play the PO role go for it. The challenge we had when they came from the business side was they had their regular job and then were asked to do that PO stuff too. Yikes, that's just not possible. We've started to migrate to using more IT resources just to help allocate enough time for them to commit to the PO role. Is that the best, probably not but the thought is as we progress in becoming a better agile corporation some of roles that we fulfill with IT resources will get moved to more business resources.

[atlasstic]

It is not business vs IT, it is owners of need and finance vs the people that realize the need. So who own the budget for the product or service defines who the product owner reports to. The PO can have their own budget, but that budget is approved by someone on an annual basis. The person or group that approves that budget is the person that hired the PO. This should not be a mystery to anyone that understand basic organization structures and finance.

The more interesting question is who do the product owner speak for. Some people claim it is for the end users, but is that really true? The person that own the budget that hired the PO is the one that decides that because that person pay the salaries of the PO and most likely the team as well. I would say most commonly the PO speaks for everyone that the product or service provides value to. That is end users, stakeholders, project managers and many more.

So the question in this video is easily answered with "where the paycheck comes from", and the PO speaks for everyone that the product or service provides value to.

[nosborlliw]

Sometimes it’s hard to trace PO’s roles because of her involvement with the development team, so it’s needed a more experienced SM to be facilitating and translating how things are going and then the PO will be able to make time to not only deal with steakholders but also be closer to the users.
Maybe the PO previous experiences can bias some behavior but it’s can change.

Is that make sense to you?

[aniokay]

Hey guys. I am considering to crossover to IT because I find it fascinating and fun. I've been a sort of project manager in the public sector and have an engineering background as well as a lot of communication experience. My question is: I have has to deal with a lot of stress in my previous jobs and my health has taken a big hit (my stress was mainly due to lack of proporly defined work areas and succes criterias - and a lot of unsolvable conflicts wrt. stakeholders and lack of ressources (that's the public organisations for you)). Is a product owner in risk of getting stressed (and even more so than the technicians?). Thanks!