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If developers are often asking you what to work on next then you aren’t doing your job effectively as a product owner. Individuals transitioning into these roles can struggle with a flatter structure, especially if they are more used to traditional hierarchy. One of the key principles of the Agile Manifesto is that teams should be self-organising and this would go against this principle.
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The product owner defines what feature is worked on by managing and prioritising the product backlog, but does not define how it should be implemented, how much time it is going to take and who works on which task. Whilst product owners are empowered to make decisions previously only confined to the leadership team, they aren’t there to manage the team. Misconception #1 – As a product owner, I manage the team Who doesn’t want to experience a CEO-like role which is only exercised by very few? However, before you embark on your product journey, let’s clear the air on some misconceptions about the role which you don’t learn during your two-day scrum product owner course. The latter ties into the fact that the product owner is often described as the ‘mini-CEO’ of a product. Also equally the appeal of being a decision maker and potentially changing the world through a new innovative product is a motivator for many. It is a role which can easily be transitioned into and is the most accessible for individuals working in project management, business analysis or marketing roles. The product owner role is key in agile and has been identified as an emerging job in 2020 by LinkedIn with a 24% annual growth in the US. Similarly organisations who resisted agile in the past are realising they need to be agile to survive and thrive both during and after the pandemic. The pandemic has however stress tested our agility (or ‘ wagility ’) with deep embedded, organisational processes and roles being challenged. Before the pandemic, many organisations had already chosen to go agile.