One of my favorite exercises from my Professional Scrum Product Owner classes is how to best sabotage a Product Owner as a member of the middle management. The exercise rules are simple: You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. So, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of the question. Instead, you are only allowed to use practices that are culturally acceptable within your organization.
Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Product Owner from the exercise results of more than twenty PSPO classes. (I edited the suggestions for better readability.)
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The exercise is based on a Liberating Structure microstructure called TRIZ.
Here is the briefing for the participants; typically, they have a five-minute timebox to come up with suggestions and observations in a workgroup of three to five people.
Once we accomplish the first part of the exercise—aggregating sabotaging practices—the workgroup then identifies those practices to sabotage Product Owners they have already witnessed, followed by identifying possible ways to counter these practices.
I categorized the results from the before-mentioned classes into eight groups:
The first category of how to best sabotage a Product Owner is generally about disqualifying Scrum itself as a helpful framework or introducing changes to conflict with the first principles of Scrum:
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If the direct approach does not yield the expected results, why not use the backdoor and help make the Scrum team as dysfunctional as possible? Some suggestions worth considering are:
If you are already messing with the Scrum Team team-building process, why not place a few obstacles into the Scrum Team’s way of working? Sabotage your Product Owner by keeping them in the dark while holding them accountable for not being up-to-date:
The next bucket of useful sabotage practices are metrics, OKRs, KPIs — you name it. Just turn the members of your Scrum team into glorified data-entry clerks with a challenging reporting burden:
All sabotage is—at least partly—based on deception. Therefore, obfuscate whatever might help the Product Owner to get an understanding of what strategic direction they are supposed to support with their Scrum team:
Does the Product Owner still lead the Scrum team towards creating Increments? Time for some rearguard action by introducing new approval stages and security measures—for the sake of your customers, of course:
Use your career equity, the network you have been building for years, to your advantage. Maybe, it is time to call in some favors:
If everything fails, don’t waste time reading the Scrum Guide. Instead, use the budgeting process to your advantage:
Every middle manager has ample opportunity to sabotage Product Owners. Moreover, most of the time, it will be unlikely that others will identify these practices as deliberate obstruction. Providing the benefit of the doubt and assuming positive intent, they probably get away with it. Therefore, reading these signals early in the process is vital to us agile practitioners.
Please keep in mind: not everyone will be excited when the organization succeeds in becoming a learning organization. Self-management and shifting decision-making to those closest to the problems will likely flatten the hierarchy, reducing the need for managers. Typically, scaling “agility” equals “descaling the organization.”
What practices to sabotage Product Owners have you observed? Please share your learnings with us in the comments.
The following resources may support your efforts to avoid to sabotage a Product Owner in your organization:
Three Essential Agile Failure Patterns in 7:31 Minutes—Making Your Scrum Work #12
Agile Failure Patterns in Organizations 2.0
How to Sabotage A Scrum Master — 44 Anti-Patterns from the Trenches
Cargo Cult Agile: The ‘State Of Agile’ Checklist For Your Organization
Scrum First Principles — How to Elon Musk the Scrum Guide
Download the ’Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide’ for Free
The Scrum Guide Reordered — understand the Scrum Guide’s patterns and concepts quickly
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