Entire Organization Respect Your Decision as a Product Owner? What are the Barriers to that?

As a Product Owner, your role is pivotal in guiding the development of products and ensuring they align with the needs of customers and the goals of the organization. To succeed in this role, it’s crucial that your decisions are respected throughout the entire organization. However, achieving universal respect can be challenging due to various barriers that may hinder the alignment of priorities, expectations, and communication.  When the question about how to ensure that the entire organization respects your decisions as a Product Owner, there needs to be a clear understanding of where everyone stands in the hierarchy. More than this, every Product Owner should have a boss unless you are operating on a smaller scale like a startup. But let’s for example you as a Product Owner are working for a large organisation and there is someone on top of you who hired you to perform the roles and responsibilities as a Product Owner, there is often the question of how you fit into this hierarchy.  

In my experience, failure to establish hierarchies and complacency to those hierarchies are significant barriers to proper Product Ownership. I say this because any successful organization needs effective organizational design and one would actually be quite surprised to know that not many people understand the importance of organizational design. Having the right organizational design around products goes all the way back to value streams because the combination of those elements on your value stream is actually your product and so instead of breaking that down and making it fit into your organizational structure, you need to organize your organization around that value stream and make that happen.

So as a Product Owner you need to establish trust in the right person and understand the bigger picture of what is really needed to get to business agility. You need to question that and put the right Product Owners in the right places. So what are the barriers to that? If you have all the decision making power as a Product Owner, you are ultimately accountable for the product that you have and if there is something wrong, it is ultimately your head on the chopping block and you should therefore have all the authority to make those decisions so that at least you could stand up for something.  

In my experience this pretty much all boils down to earning the trust within your team to do this or that. And how do you earn that trust? With evidence! In order to get them to remove the barrier and prove what you are doing, you need to run experiments and show results. For example, once I ran five experiments but three of them didn’t work out as intended and so we focused on the two remaining ones where we got some good results and used that as a point of reference going forward.  

Gaining universal respect as a Product Owner is a journey that requires patience, persistence, and effective communication. By overcoming the common barriers that can obstruct respect within your organization, you can create a more collaborative and productive environment where your decisions as a Product Owner are valued and trusted. Ultimately, this will lead to more successful product development and a stronger, more cohesive organization. However in the end, respect is not just earned through words and explanations; it’s solidified through actions and outcomes. By consistently delivering results that align with the organization’s goals, you not only gain respect but also become a driving force for success within your product development team and your entire organization. 

If you want to learn more about embodying Agile Leadership as a Product Owner, get in touch with Ralph and he’ll lead the way! 

About Effective Agile

Ralph Jocham is a Change Agent in Scrum // Agile // Coaching // Evidence Based Management and also a Professional Scrum Trainer based in Europe.

As one of the first Professional Scrum Trainers in the world, Ralph has worked directly with cocreator of #scrum, Ken Schwaber, and has played an integral part in the course development of the #PSPO (Professional Scrum Product Owner) as well as the delivery of all #scrum.org certified courses.

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