agileYork - The 5 pillars of collaborative product ownership

The 5 pillars of collaborative product ownership

While business knowledge and domain expertise is useful and essential, is this only achievable with a 'single wringable neck'? What would happen if the whole team could be encouraged to take ownership of product direction?

This session looks at how we have often created dysfunctional relationships with our product owners through both the way we collaborate (or don't) with them and the language we use to talk about the role itself.

We will discuss questions like:

is having a product owner an anti-pattern?why do we discourage 'hero' developers but encourage 'hero' product owners?do product owners make it hard to have a sustainable pace?can the whole team engage in product ownership?what can you do to support your PO?

About John Le Drew

Starting my career in systems administration, I first dipped into software engineering writing automation and data migration tools mostly using Perl and VBScript on Windows. This sparked my interest and led to 10 years as a software engineer, working in a wide range of environments and languages including C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, VB, Java, JavaScript and probably more that I have forgotten!

After a decade as a software engineer, I then spent most of the last 10 years as an independent consultant. Working with companies to help them get the most out of their technology teams. I soon recognised that the technological problems I was hired to solve, were rooted not in technology, but in the way teams were collaborating. This led me to research lean and agile ways of working, transforming my practice.