Hardly any company in Germany has not tried to increase efficiency and flexibility in projects and organisations using agile methods. While agile pilot projects are often successful, the comprehensive rollout of agile practices at departmental or company level poses considerable challenges for management and HR departments.
Companies cite many reasons why they want to introduce agility, including
- Agile methods deliver high-quality results faster.
- Problems are recognised and addressed at an early stage thanks to agile approaches.
- The new models of collaboration and role allocation increase employee motivation.
However, scaling successful pilot projects to the entire organisation poses considerable difficulties:
- Conflicts arise from contradictory strategy and planning processes (top-down vs. self-organised).
- New roles and responsibilities clash with established hierarchies and traditional job descriptions.
- Companies are facing an unwanted cultural change, as agile principles are spreading faster than existing rules and processes can be adapted.
The challenge of the hybrid form – agility meets traditional structures
In practice, hybrid approaches are often developed to integrate agility into traditional structures. Teams or departments are allowed to work according to Scrum or Kanban, while the higher-level management continues to follow traditional methods. Former team or project managers are quickly appointed as product owners, often without the necessary agile training.
At first glance, this hybrid system appears to be a simple solution for establishing agility in the company. In practice, however, this mixture leads to numerous problems that significantly diminish the positive effects of agility. Company energy is wasted in conflicts of objectives and rules, which impairs performance, motivation and the actual benefits of agility. Two concrete examples of such conflicts of objectives:
- The agile approach emphasises regular adjustments and improvements (e.g. through retrospectives), but this can be blocked by company-wide standards.
- Traditional planning processes with long-term forecasts significantly limit the flexibility of agile teams.
Our three top tips for the sensible use of agility and the role of the product owner in traditional organisations:
- Agility serves to master complexity. Analyse the context in which your project, product development or value creation takes place and design the organisation accordingly.
- Set up your organisation from the perspective of your customers and develop your products and teams along these lines. The product owner should ensure precisely this customer orientation. Give the role a clear mandate and avoid additional tasks.
- Choose experienced agile coaches who not only moderate meetings, but also support and coach the product owner and other stakeholders in an agile context – and are available for discussions with management.
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We identify obstacles, solve challenges and promote agile collaboration. In doing so, we focus specifically on adapted processes and techniques to shape your team into a self-organised, efficient unit. Our approach is not strictly based on the Scrum framework, but is optimally tailored to your needs and organisation. Benefit from our expertise, achieve your goals faster and sustainably increase your team’s performance by using agile methods.
The challenging role of the product owner
In this “agile waterfall world”, product owners are often the ones who suffer, as they find themselves right at the interface between traditional and agile organisation. In theory, the role of the product owner combines the view of top management with a focus on customers and products as well as collaboration with development teams. In practice, however, product owners are often recruited from the ranks of project or team leaders without developing a sufficient understanding of the new role. This leads to misunderstandings, an overload of tasks and a lack of contact persons within the company.
Product owners take on a completely new role in the company. While project or team leaders are traditionally hierarchically responsible for the entire team, the product owner focuses exclusively on the product from the customer’s perspective. Agility serves to master complexity; the roles in agile systems only cover sub-areas of responsibility within a cross-functional organisation. This new role can only be fulfilled effectively if it is understood by management and given the necessary mandate.
Tasks and responsibilities of a product owner
In the agile literature, especially in Scrum, the responsibilities of a product owner are clearly defined. The main tasks include:
- Recording the requirements of stakeholders (e.g. customers).
- Developing and formulating a product vision.
- Evaluation and prioritisation of requirements according to business value.
- Management of the product backlog (transparency, traceability and comprehensibility).
- Writing user stories according to clear quality criteria (“Definition of Ready”).
- Communicating and explaining the requirements to the developers.
- Availability for developer questions.
- Acceptance and verification of product increments. – Giving feedback to the team.
In summary, the product owner represents the customer perspective and brings this perspective to projects, products or services in collaboration with a self-organised team. In its pure form, this role is intended as a line task, but can also be developed as a project role – whereby the discussion about the exact form should not influence the core task of customer-oriented product design.
Common management mistakes when introducing the Product Owner role
Deviations from the clearly defined role of the product owner significantly weaken its effectiveness. The product owner is often confronted with expectations that originate from traditional, waterfall-like process models. However, if the product owner is called upon to assume economic or disciplinary responsibility for a team, to act as a controlling authority or to undermine the self-organisation of agile teams, this inevitably leads to frustration and inefficiency – and ultimately to disappointing results.
Examples of common, avoidable mistakes:
- Product owners assume economic or personal responsibility for teams.
- They are misused as a control body for team performance.
- Agile principles, which are intended to promote team transparency and self-organisation, are damaged by status reports to the PO or comparisons of the velocity of several teams.
- The PO must closely coordinate his sprint planning with higher-level milestone planning.
- Team-internal complexity estimates are converted into effort estimates to feed capacity and resource planning.
- The PO intervenes in the self-organisation of the teams, for example through ad-hoc actions in sprints.
- The availability of the product owner is restricted by parallel management tasks.
Conclusion
Agile methods and modern approaches contrast with traditional, waterfall-like development and management methods. Mixing these two worlds harbours considerable risks and potential for conflict. The product owner is often the role that suffers the most, as they are frequently thrust into this new responsibility without the right mandate and sufficient training.
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