Meet Ms. SWAT-i, a Product Owner (PO) for whom everything is a fire-fighting operation. She handles everything as a SWAT team operation, often at the last moment.

Anti-patterns

Ms. PO, you want to ensure your team fails? Use some of these anti-patterns 🙁

Not being available to team. An absent PO is a sure shot to failure! Even a high performing team can not mitigate this.

Absolutely no knowledge of the business domain!

Focus on yourself (CYA, how I keep my job) rather than focusing on Customer

Unclear about the backlog items. Not having enough information, not having answers for the team when they ask for clarification.

Focused on just the early wins, low hanging fruits! [You should be focused on HV,LE items (High Value, Low Effort) ]

PO who is tied down to a chain! A PO who is not empowered is a sure shot to delays and confusion.

Asking team to start driving without telling them where you want to go. Even worse would be for PO to not know where she wants to go (anyone heard of the Vision statement!)

Over committing to your stakeholder (sucking up to them!?) without consulting your team.

Say ‘Yes’ to every change that comes your way. Say ‘Yes’ to all the requests from your stakeholders and pushing them to ‘in-flight’ sprints

Play musical chair with your team in the sprint! Keep changing priorities even for those stories within your sprint.

Doing the product owner role by committee! (Trying to keep everyone happy in the stakeholders community)

Instead of being a bridge between dev team and customers, stakeholder community, get them into pissing contest, having them pointing fingers at each other. It’s more important to find someone to blame rather then delivering value!

Sounds familier?

Is any of your PO exhibiting these behavior(s)? Run as far as you can from one if you have! 

In the next post, we will meet another PO, Ms. Fab, who is polar opposite of Ms. SWAT-i. She will show you how the PO can create VALUE for you, your team, your organization.