Engaging the reluctant Product Owner

Product Owners are what drives a team.  They are the motivation and the catalyst behind any successful agile team.  For many struggling agile teams the biggest bang for the buck in improvement is an engaged product owner.  But how do you take a reluctant, absent product expert and convert them into a successful product owner?  You train them.  And how do you motivate these Product Owners In Training to engage?  You make it worth their while.


Product Owners, like all people, only repeat behavior that works for them.  Therefore, our job as agile team members and scrum masters is to provide that value to keep the PO coming back for more.  We provide that value through early and repetitive visibiltiy into what we are building, and the ability to easily change course when what we are building does not match their ever growing insight into what should be built.

A core requirement of a good product owner is to have the industry domain experience and the ability to fashion a vision of solving buisness needs within that domain.  However, PO's cannot be expected to nail this vision right out of the box; they need input to help aid with constant course correction to make that initial vision into a usable solution.  Think of the old artillery capabilities where an initial shot was fired, response was fed back to the artillery captain regarding adjustments, another shot was fired, and the process repeated until they were on target.  Modern systems rely on specific coordinates and GPS aids to directly target the first time, but PO's don't have a built in SatNav receiver.  They need this fire and learn feedback to adjust their vision.  Providing this feedback, and teaching them how to use it, is part of the value return for a PO.

And this feedback comes from working software.  We couldn't with honest confidence tell the artillery captain before the shot is fired "Your shot will land right at these coordinates, so you need to adjust accordingly".  In the same mode we cannot provide the needed feedback on product direction without those early shots given in the form of product demo's.  Invest in making those demo sessions provide that needed insight, and with a little encouragement your product owner will become an eager fan and no longer find reasons to skip your demo's.  Continue this process throughout the sprint and you are well on the way to building your own super PO.