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Feeling Undermined in My Role as Product Owner

Last post 07:16 pm April 18, 2025 by Ian Mitchell
1 reply
03:11 pm April 18, 2025

I’m currently dealing with a situation and I’m not sure if any of you, as Product Owners, have experienced something similar or how you’ve handled it — particularly in work environments where there’s a lack of respect from someone on the Dev team.

I’ve been receiving repeated messages from the team’s architect via Jira tickets, where he asks me for clarifications on topics that he could easily direct to the person who’s actually responsible for the input or created the ticket. For example, someone from Business created a bug ticket that didn’t follow the format Dev expects. When the architect responds, he tags both me as the PO and the person from Business with messages like:

To me, this feels deeply disrespectful — and this is not the only time he’s pointed fingers at me like this. His behavior is causing me both stress and sadness, because I truly want a positive and respectful work environment.

I feel like he’s giving me orders, and while the Dev team says they reach out to me because I’m their Ansprechpartner (main point of contact) and not Business, and that I should be the intermediary — I don’t have a problem acting as an intermediary. What I do have a problem with is being constantly singled out by the architect, as if I’m not doing my job properly.

If only I could find another job...


07:16 pm April 18, 2025

It sounds as though the work was not ready for Sprint Planning. If Developers expect Product Backlog items to be in a certain format, then this ought to be taken care of in Product Backlog refinement. Is enough time being reserved each Sprint for refinement to happen?


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