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Product Owner excluding or ignoring stakeholders

Last post 05:35 pm December 18, 2018 by Daniel Wilhite
2 replies
07:02 pm December 17, 2018

I have a puzzle that is the opposite of what we normally see in Scrum: Instead of the stakeholders trying to micromanage the Product Owner, I have a situation where a Product Owner is excluding or ignoring stakeholders.

The Product Owner only includes those from his own org, while other orgs who depend on the output of his team are not getting transparency into the process, not being invited to the Sprint Reviews, and not being informed of changes to the product backlog that affect their planning and timelines.

An example might be a Product Owner in IT ignoring downstream training orgs that depend on the IT changes and schedules.

How do we handle this?


01:32 am December 18, 2018

Who is empowering the Product Owner to act on behalf of the stakeholders, if it is not the stakeholders themselves?

A PO is accountable to stakeholders for product value, and this implies that they should be able, jointly, to hold the PO to account.


05:35 pm December 18, 2018

So would you be surprised if I said that your situation isn't really unusual?  

@Ian is right in asking who is empowering the PO to act on the behalf of the stakeholders. But from what you explained and what I have experienced, it is less about who is empowering and who the PO wants to include. I have experienced that where the PO includes the people that they know will agree with what the PO wants.  Yeah, not good.  

How does the Development Team feel about this?  Are the "left out" stakeholders bringing up the issue and if so, to whom?  Has anyone discussed this with the PO or discussed it in Retro?  The different roles in the Scrum Team are accountable to each other.  So if the Dev Team or Scrum Master feels that the PO is not adequately representing the stakeholders, they should bring it up. 

From the Scrum Guide 

When the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect are embodied and lived by the Scrum Team, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone. 

 


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