Product Owner challenge

Are the stakeholders making this case against the actual Product or the Product Increment? 

The Product Owner should be empowered and accountable for the Product and the release of Product Increments to market. 

After an immediate change in the structure of the company in sprint review of last sprint new holding stakeholders did not find project applicable.

It sounds as though the Product Owner has been taken by surprise. Was this change based on evidence, including evidence he or she supplied regarding the current and unrealized value of the product?

This is one of the advantages of agile methods. The stakeholders, especially those who are funding the efforts, have extreme visibility into the state of the effort and routinely get value delivered. When the cost of delivering the next iteration exceeds the value that could be realized, the effort can be terminated and the team can disband and move to other efforts that would add value.

If the effort is no longer being funded by this particular customer and there is no one else to fund it, it doesn't seem like there is much to do other than end the effort. But it could be an opportunity for the Product Owner to reflect. The termination of an effort coming as a surprise in a Sprint Review could mean that there are some disconnects between the Product Owner and the various stakeholders. There may be opportunities for the Product Owner to look at methods and strategies for working more closely with the stakeholders.

 they noted that whole product increments and definition of the done concept presented in scrum review do not reflect any corporate value itself and does not match the strategic view of holding company. In conclusion, they wanted to Product Owner to cancel the project.

What Product owner should do in this case?

The primary responsibility of a Product Owner is maximizing the business value delivered by the Development Team.   If there is no longer a business value component associated with the project due to the structure change in the company, then the decision on what to do should be clear to the PO.

Perhaps it would be beneficial for the PO to reflect on their efforts "compil(ing) a list of Product Backlog items" ahead of time.   Depending on the volume and level of detail associated with these items, this may represent waste, and can serve as a good lesson to work in a more empirical fashion and not plan too far out into the future.



The only statement of yours that seems troubling to me is the stakeholder view that the "Definition of Done" concept is  somehow contrary to corporate value and their strategic view.   I understand if their comments were all related to the project in question, but I would have serious concerns if they somehow did not value the idea of a DoD in and of itself.

The wording of the original post is confusing for me unfortunately (no disrespect intended for original writer, just letting them know in case my answer goes in the wrong direction).

I am reading this as saying that the company has gone through a recent change. This might be just an internal organization structure shuffle or based on the holding company comment at the end of the post it could actually be a buy-out/merge/sale of the company.

If this is true then it appears there are at least two interpretations from there. 

1) The company has decided to make some changes in it's products/product lines etc. For me this means the Product Owner should spend some significant time with the new owners/stake-holders to determine their views for the product. It's not unusual for an acquiring company to shut down a product (or flag it for replacement with one of their own) so in this case the answer might be a wrapping up on the project, possibly requesting a bit of time to correct a few critical/high impact bugs while also getting to know stakeholders better

2) The new company has a different way of working (perhaps traditional project management or lean/kanban or ....) and they have no interest in/or knowledge of scrum. In this situation the Product Owner should team up with the Scrum Master and consider meeting with the stakeholders to determine what options exist to continue with scrum especially if there is interest in knowledge transfer/benefits of scrum in the company to date.

I hope that helps.

~Jamie N