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by Simon Baker.
Original Post: You can't own something part-time
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On the first day of the Agile Business Conference, Roman Pichler talked about the Role of the Agile Product Owner. It was a succinct presentation of the basic responsibilities of Scrum's Product Owner role. Roman conveyed the likelihood that the Product Owner would not be available all of the time (he mentioned hot-desking) nor be colocated with the team. He showed a hypothetical calendar day for a Product Owner that had an hour blocked out in the morning dedicated to collaboration with the team. This set-up is a reality for many companies, indeed it's probably the accepted norm.
That's bad! The Product Owner should be a full-time member of the team and be colocated with the team. If he's not then, in my opinion, the team's agility is compromised. The team cannot possibly achieve all that they are capable of achieving on the project. Time-boxing interaction between the team and the Product Owner constrains collaboration with the business. In my mind, collaboration is not something that you turn on and off depending on the time of day. It's a hive of conversation and activity that permeates the environment generating hustle. If you want to achieve hyper-productivity, one of the things you need to be able to do is talk with the Product Owner, as and when you need to, and to demonstrate vertical slices of a user storymany times a day to get feedback.
If the project is vital to the business, then the company can always find a way to provide a full-time and colocated Product Owner. If they say they can't, it really means they won't. Quite simply, they're not prepared to do what is necessary to achieve it, and frankly, if they're not going to take the project seriously why should you? Usually, the obstacle relates to a silo'ed organisation where departments are arranged by role rather than product stream. Hardly an insurmountable obstacle ... really.
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