Scrum Product Owner Anti-Patterns (9) – The Absent Product Owner (Hands-on Agile Webinar #6)

If you are working as a product owner, there is — very likely — room for improvement. I curated the most common product owner anti-patterns to help you up your game. If you like to improve on those anti-patterns that you recognize why don’t you ask the scrum master and the team for support? The product owner anti-patterns list is a good starting point for a mutually beneficial retrospective.

According to the Scrum Guide, the product owner is sole and accountable person optimizing the work of the engineers. In other words, the product owner has ideas or identifies ideas, or at least he or she curates suitable ideas from wherever and validates them whether those ideas are “product backlog worthy” or not. In my experience, this approach turns the product owner into the Achilles heel — or bottleneck by design — of the whole process. If you "remove" the PO as an independent and respected role, for example, by sticking with your organizations' stage-gate process, Scrum easily mutates into a Waterfall 2.0 process.

This Hands-on Agile mini-series addresses 12 familiar product owner anti-patterns interfering with the concept of the Scrum product owner role. Learn how to improve your professional performance by avoiding the typical product owner mistakes: from oversized product backlogs and prioritization by proxy, to be absent during the sprint, and outing yourself as a loner during the sprint review.

This episode covers the absent product owner. If the PO is not available for immediate clarification, he or she will create artificial queues that probably will put the scrum team’s sprint goal at risk. For example, the product owner does not accept sprint backlog items once those are finished. Instead, he or she waits until the end of the sprint. (In the spirit of continuous integration, the product owner should immediately check tasks that meet the acceptance criteria. Otherwise, the product owner will create an artificial queue which will increase the cycle-time. This habit puts also reaching the sprint goal at risk.) (This anti-pattern creates a micro-waterfall approach for the duration of the sprint.)

HOST: Stefan Wolpers