Get rid of the Product Owner!
It’s a term introduced with Scrum, but it is creating more confusion than making things clear.
New people to Scrum, have no clue what it means. Even when explained and shown, it’s still not clear to them.
First, it’s an exceedingly difficult role to do. You need to have domain knowledge, being good at requirement analyse and have technical skills and/or knowledge in IT solutions, but above all you should have a passion for the deliverable(s) and want to make it better for the user.
It’s a lot of responsibilities in one role and that’s why we often fail to find the right person for it.
The thing is, we already have a name for a role like that.
It’s called the Product Manager. The product manager has a deep knowledge of the product, the market, and customers. They are responsible for both strategic and tactical activities and can easily context-switch between an internal and external focus. They (should) have the passion for what is being delivered.
It perfectly describes the big responsibilities of this rol.
And if the work is too much for the Product Manager to do, we have another role for that. The Requirement Analyst, an expert on gathering requirements and documenting detailed user stories, who can help the Product Manager.
