What to do with the Product Owner? Stop writing proposals , start selling Sprints

What to do with the Product Owner? 🤔

Stop writing proposals ✍️, start selling Sprints 💰

That’s in a nutshell the approach I used when I was Scrum Master for a team, part of a web agency. We developed web applications for external customers. Although this way of working proved to be successful, the Product Owner role remained challenging to fulfill effectively.

When we started selling Sprints, the Product Owner was someone from our own organization. However, the customer really owned the product budget 💰. As a result, the Product Owner was limited in their role. Another negative side effect was the mindset of the customer itself. Instead of playing an active role with the team, they shifted into a passive role: “Here’s our list of requirements, good luck building it!”. 🤷‍♂️

Our Product Owner was completely powerless. Instead of ‘order makers’, they became ‘order takers’. ❌

So, we decided to make the customer the Product Owner! In addition, the former Product Owner (someone from our web agency) changed into a supporter, coach, and mentor for the new Product Owner.

Some things that happened were:
1️⃣ Because the customer turned into the Product Owner, they also needed a desk near the Scrum team. In some cases, we moved our entire team to the customer’s locations, and sometimes the customer would sit in our office;
2️⃣ The customer joined all the Scrum events. They initiated the Sprint Planning, joined the Daily Scrums (when necessary), organized the Sprint Review, and participated in the Sprint Retrospectives;
3️⃣ Our former Product Owner coached & mentored the customer on a daily basis with their new role. He would advise them on how to order the Product Backlog, create a roadmap, determine when to release, etc.
4️⃣ The customer became responsible for setting the Product Goal (although we didn’t use the term yet), and for crafting potential Sprint Goals;
5️⃣ It was also the customer who took the lead during the Sprint Review and share an update with the stakeholders from his own organization;

In a way, we gave the steering wheel to the customer, and immediately they understood that driving like a maniac was only going to derail the development of the product. 🚗

The impact of radical and contradictory decisions became more clear when the customer actually joined the Scrum team. And the benefits of a sustainable pace were beneficial for everyone. Most importantly, the feeling of shared product ownership grew strongly. Not only with the customer but also with the developers. Because the developers worked so closely with the customer, they really understood the value of the product and what it made possible.

I also noticed that the mindset of “us” versus “them” slowly disappeared. Instead, a feeling of “we’re all in this together” started to emerge and this gave collaboration and morale a strong boost!

Over time, quite a bunch of customers acquired their (product) driving license 😎

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