Captain or Crew? Making the Product Owner’s contribution visible

I have been an actor in and around teams working based on Agile principles for many years by now. There seems to be a recurring question that I have got many times from people new to this way of working. As one of the basic traits of a team working within Agile principles is TRANSPARENCY, every work item should be visible. This helps with both accountability as well as diminishing the need for reporting and control.

In this situation, the product owner, or whatever name is given to the people who direct and provide priorities and decision making service (I’ll call it product owner) is also driven to a need to show up work. This creates a situation where one wants to both provide a role model as well as doing ones job. These two aspects do not go well together for the product owner role. As this is a special role, it should be treated as such.

First, the need to come on line with the rest of the team is legitimate, yet one needs to understand that a ships captain is not just like any other sailor, so many times not all rules apply to the captain. This is one aspect to consider…how much of a captain is  and how much apart does the product owner wants to set itself out. The main argument for this is that vision is long term and sharing might pollute the daily work. Most times the product owner works or has access to longer term plans and works to iron out the details for the team to be ready to work on them at some point in the future. 

Why is that? To continue on the maritime examples (since One Piece is raging success these days ..), if you were on the sea, would you get your crow’s nest sailor down to wash the deck, instead of spotting the horizon for opportunities or danger? This is part of the role, and sometimes this work should not be accounted for, it just happens.

To not venture too far from the opening question, balance is advised, as with all things in life. So the product owner work should be visible, should have impact both inside and outside of the team. Yet, this is different work, different from what all other team members do daily, so it can be tracked in a different manner. Each team will feel for sure if their product owner role owner does the job, so making work visible is less important. It is far more important to make the impact visible and easy to see. 

Impact  over tracking!