Limit Product Owner Mental Workload
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Description
Scale the number of Product Owners to prevent overloading the product ownership function.
Rationale
There are practical limits to the Mental Workload that a single Product Owner can effectively and sustainably support. Although a single Product Owner is the ideal model, as complexity and scale increases, a limit is reached whereby it becomes necessary to share the load across multiple Product Owners. The mental workload for the role of product ownership has the following contributing factors:
- Scope and depth of business domain expertise required
- Value stream complexity
- Numbers of stakeholder relationships to be maintained
- Number of teams involved in delivery
- Commercial context complexity
- Competencies of the Teams in the business and technical domain and their capability of taking higher-order work
An overloaded Product Owner will likely be:
- Less available to the team and stakeholders leading to a drop in collaboration and delayed decision making.
- Unable to maintain productive relationships with stakeholders
- Less well prepared for Refinement meetings due to a lack of time to understand customer challenges and business context.
- Making lower quality decisions