Technical Product Owner
So here’s the problem: Some teams have stories that are very “technical” in nature. By technical I mean that these stories are usually development oriented (in language, and in subject matter) and they are hard to relate to direct customer value. Often these stories are related to maintenance activities that have a strong perceived need to be done by various stakeholders, but are not explicitly requested by our external customers. Some examples include:
Stories requested by operations
Stories that have to do with infrastructure improvements
Stories related to technical debt
In some cases product owners have a real problem working with these stories. They complain that the stories refer to technologies or acronyms that they don’t understand. They maintain that they are a customer advocate and don’t care what the details are – just fix it. They don’t know how to judge when these stories are done.
To address this problem we have created a sub-category of product owner that we call a “technical” product owner. If you are starting to feel a bit squeamish at this point, I don’t blame you one bit. So who is a technical product owner? In this case it is usually the development lead for the team – or perhaps a director of development.
The solution is a well intentioned one, but there are consequences. The problems with using a “technical product owner” that I see in practice:
The technical PO has no connection with the rest of the Product Management/Business/Customer organization. This basically sets the team up to operate without having to deliver value that the rest of the organization recognizes. It seems to aggravate silos within an organization.
The Product Management (PO) team gets to ignore important decisions regarding the maintenance and upkeep of business systems. When you buy the car, you need to be responsible for it’s upkeep. All too often I know PO’s who refuse to address technical debt when it is brought to them. Instead they prioritize new features higher – sooner or later it comes back to haunt them.
Teams get out of the habit of working with user stories that customers can relate too. Or they take perfectly good user stories and break them down into “technical stories”. There are all sorts of reasons this happens to teams – but we don’t want to codify the practice by creating a special “technical PO”.
It can reflect an organization’s unwillingness to organize projects that are aligned across the organization rather than within technical silos.
Personally, I think that we should be able to put all stories – regardless of where they originate into terms that anyone can understand. Failure to do that may lead you down a path that leads to the “Technical Product Owner”. Watch out.
#PO #Agile #ProductOwner #Story #Technicalproductowner #Stories #storywriting #Scrum