The Product Owner is accountable for sustained end value

Description

A Product Owner should have visibility, ownership and decision-making authority for an end-to-end value stream from customer demand/need through to realised customer value (“Scope of Accountability”).

In larger products where it is not practical for a single Product Owner to have accountability for the full value stream, aim so that each Product Owner is accountable for an end-to-end slice of the value stream.

Product Owners should be Entrepreneurial and own the full life cycle of the Product, including operational profitability. The Product Owner is accountable for balancing short, medium and long-term outcomes to generate sustained value over time.

Rationale

The idea of this principle is to avoid decision-making driven by prioritisation and local optimisation of work that doesn't directly support the long-term sustained value delivered by teams. Some examples of situations to be avoided:

• Sharing responsibility over temporal lines, for example: a Product Owner for release 1 and a different one for release 2, leading to short-termism and potential issues for later Product Owners to have to deal with.
• Partitioning responsibility to a technical layer or component leading to local optimisation of technical work that isn’t aligned with delivering the highest customer and business value and is likely to generate greater waste.
• Partitioning responsibility around specific features, leading to local optimisation within the feature that may be less valuable than functionality outside of it that team(s) could be contributing to.

Where a Product Owner does not have a clear line of sight to customer and business value, it reduces the quality of their decisions and lowers the motivation of their teams. In addition there will be a high probability of increased waste, for example, poorly aligned work with lower customer satisfaction, delays driven by interdependencies with other teams and Product Owners, and over-production leading to unused functionality.

Related Principles

• Limit Product Owner Mental Workload - Contending: the larger the product development, the higher the mental workload for a Product Owner
• Minimum Viable Product Owners
• Minimise unnecessary complexity
• Each team "sees" exactly one Product Owner
• Outcome is the primary measure of success
• PO should inspect to see if outcomes have been achieved
• Organise around value streams
• End-to-End Product