If you must split the Product Owner role, don’t treat it as separate roles—treat it as a delegation problem and get crystal clear on decision-making.
Should you split the Scrum Product Owner role? Many organizations do—but is it the right move? In this episode, we break down why companies divide the PO role (often into Product Manager, Product Owner, and/or Business Analyst), the hidden downsides that can hurt product success, and the key to making it work if you must split it.
Learn how a proven delegation model can prevent misalignment, reduce bottlenecks, and improve decision-making. Don’t let a split PO role slow your team down!
Learn More
Certified Scrum Product Owner Workshop (virtual, instructor-led)
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner Program (virtual, instructor-led)
Episode transcription
Richard Lawrence
Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show!
Today, we’re looking at the Product Owner role in Scrum, and specifically our real-world advice about a split PO role.
We’ll discuss how the Product Owner was originally defined, why some organizations choose to split the role between 2 or even 3 people, whether that’s a good idea, and how to get the best results if you’re part of a split PO role.
Peter Green
And, as a reminder, The Humanizing Work show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
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Richard
OK, let’s start by talking about the Product Owner role and where it came from. It was originally just a renamed product manager. But, as the name implies, the goal of renaming it, was to emphasize ownership of the product.
It’s not just managing things, which can imply somebody who’s just taking input from other people and crafting documents from it, but a sense of really owning outcomes for a product.
It was designed to be an end-to-end role from understanding customers and markets all the way to collaborating with a team to make the product exist.
In Scrum, the PO role is one unified role that sets the direction for a team.
And if the Product Owner role is designed to be one role, that implies that it’s designed to be done by one person. In the early days of Scrum, there was some unfortunate but evocative language around that, I remember Ken Schwaber used to refer to the Product Owner—he may still refer to the Product Owner– as the “single-wringable neck,” like the one person who was responsible for the outcome of a Scrum team’s work.
Peter
Despite that original design for the role, in many organizations today, the Product Owner role ends up being split between two or even three or more people. So why does this happen?
Well, we’ve seen two main reasons for it.
The first is a desire to match existing job codes through a career progression. One of the weaknesses of the Scrum roles is that there’s not really a clear way to have a career as a Scrum Master or a Product Owner at least not one where you’re moving up in a hierarchy and seeing progress from role to role. That’s important to people. They experience a sense of mastery and purpose from having more responsibility and more recognition and, for better or worse, that happens in organizations through promotions.
If you just have Scrum teams in an organization, things are fairly flat. So, some organizations split the PO role so that it lines up with other job codes that have more junior and more senior roles. The junior ones are more tactical, working closely with the team. While the senior ones are more strategic, working with customers and thinking about big picture stuff.
Richard
And the second reason that we see the Product Owner role get split is when the job gets too big for one person, which usually happens when you’re scaling an initiative beyond a single team or you have a team serving multiple demand sources.
So, either you have multiple teams working on the same thing and the job starts to get too big for a single Product Owner and you kind of have a hierarchy of Product Ownership, which happens pretty naturally in that situation.
Or you have multiple demand sources coming to a single backlog that one or more teams work on. And in those cases, you may not have one person that’s the expert on all the things.
And, by the way, for more on how to handle that situation check out Ep 82 on the visionary versus facilitating Product Ownership here: visionary/facilitating PO models episode
Either way, as the job starts getting too big for one person to do, it makes sense for more than one person to share it.
Peter
So you may have kind of an objective workload-related reason that causes you to split it. And you may also have a career progression reason that causes you to split the PO role. And both of those can intersect in the same context.
Richard
But is it a good idea? Does splitting the Product Owner role actually create the outcomes you want?
Peter
Yeah, well, it’s going to create the career progression possibility. So, it does that job, and that can be pretty important.
Richard
I guess the other question we need to look at though is, does it create better outcomes? Does more value flow through the teams? Do you get a better return on your investment if you split the role?
And I think the unfortunate answer there is a lot of times you don’t. You see diminishing returns as things get larger and roles get split because coordination is a challenge. There’s often not clarity at the handoffs between the different roles. And so information gets lost. There’s rework. There’s just teams building the wrong thing. And that eats away at a lot of the benefits that you might get. But it’s a situation that a lot of people are in.
So, with the rest of this episode, we want to talk through what do you do in the situation?
For one reason or another, it has made sense in your organization to split the Product Owner role. Maybe you have somebody with a Product Manager title doing the strategic end of things. Maybe you have somebody with a Product Owner title doing the more tactical team-facing end of things.
How do you make sure that you don’t pick up the downsides of that split, a lack of clarity at the handoffs, troubles with coordination and alignment?
Here’s the secret for making the most of a split PO role:
Don’t treat the parts of the PO role as you’ve split it as separate roles. Treat it as one role, owned by the most senior, most strategic person who’s doing part of that role, with them delegating some of the role to other people. It’s a delegation problem.
And we have tools for thinking clearly about delegation.
So, let’s play that out…
Peter
When it comes to delegation, our favorite way to think about this is Jurgen Appelo’s 7 Levels of Delegation model; it’s just really useful for thinking clearly about sharing power or authority. For most of us, if we think about delegation or shared decision-making at all, we think of basically three options:
- It’s my decision
- It’s your decision, or
- We have to agree on the decision
In the 7 Levels of Delegation, those are 3 of the 7 levels, but they’re not actually the most useful ones. There’s nuance in between that’s much more practical for real-world decision-making in our experience. So, let’s walk through the levels.
Level 1 is TELL. At level 1, it’s my decision, and I’ll tell you what it is, and we’re not really going to discuss it after that.
Level 2 is SELL. And at this level, it’s still my decision, I’m going to make it, you’re not going to change my mind about it, but I want you to understand why I made that decision, so I’m going to invite questions about it. I’m going to sell you on why it’s a good idea to make this decision.
Level 3 is CONSULT. Now it starts getting interesting. I’m going to decide, but I’ll consult you and consider your input before I make a decision.
Level 4 is AGREE. At level 4, there’s no decision unless we both agree on it. Level 4 is consensus, and for that reason, a little bit slow.
Level 5 is ADVISE. This is the mirror image of level 3. Now, it’s your decision, but I want you to seek my advice before you make the decision.
Level 6, a mirror of level 2. Is you decide, we call this “inquire,” but after you’ve made the decision, I’d like to be able to ask questions about it to make sure we’re aligned.
Finally, level 7 is DELEGATE. It’s totally your decision; I may not even ask you about it after the fact.
Richard
So how does this apply to a split Product Owner role? Well, we can take the whole series of decisions that a product owner needs to make from what target customer are we going to go after, what problems are we going to focus on for them, what’s our vision for a successful outcome on this initiative, all the way down to what are the details of this backlog item at the top of a product backlog, and everything in between.
So, you can list out that whole series of decisions, from strategic to tactical, and by the way, you can check out our PO board model in Ep 45 to see how some of those clump together on different time horizons here: PO Board model episode
Then for each of those decisions, model it as the most senior person delegating at some level, to other people.
You may have the chosen customer segment, the target market sitting at a level two of delegation. I’m going to decide that, but I want you to understand why I decided it.
You may have the vision for an initiative sitting at a three. I’m ultimately going to own the vision, but I want to get your input and perspective as I do it.
We might do some feature mining together and agree on the first feature to explore. So, that might be at a four.
Breaking the feature into stories might sit at a five. I’m going to provide some input about that, but you can come up with the stories that make sense as part of this feature, and it’s up to you.
The details of those stories and what “done” looks like, might be a five or even a six.
You can see there’s this progression from less to more delegated as things get more tactical.
We’ve skimmed over just a handful of decisions here, but you’ll see that the more strategic are going to be at the top of the levels of delegation. The more tactical are going to be at the bottom levels of delegation. As they pass through levels three, four, and five, consult, agree, advise, you get these opportunities for creating alignment at the handoff. You don’t have this hard, it’s mine, and then suddenly it’s yours, division, which causes information to be lost. Seeking and taking advice into account around the middle of the handoff provides opportunities for creating alignment and shared clarity on the job.
Peter
That’s how we recommend being successful with a split PO role. Figure out what decisions need to be made as part of that role, and then figure out how the more senior, more strategic, person is effectively delegating pieces of the PO role to somebody else and at what level of delegation. You may not initially agree on this, so it’s good to negotiate where those boundaries are and how you’re going to make those decisions.
One of the big breakthroughs that our clients often have is realizing all these things that they were acting like were at a level 2 or a level 6 are really at a level 3, or a 4, or a 5. Agreeing explicitly on those things makes it much easier to work together when multiple people are sharing a role like this. It just makes expectations really clear.
Richard
If you can avoid it, I would say don’t split the PO role. Keep it simple. Start with one person who owns something end-to-end, but in the real world, as organizations scale, as initiatives scale, you may need to split the role to make it manageable, and
“If you must split the Product Owner role, don’t treat it as separate roles—treat it as a delegation problem and get crystal clear on the decision-making.”
If you’d like to learn more about these ideas, join us in an upcoming Product Owner or Advanced Product Owner workshop. You can find the details at humanizingwork.com/cspo.
And if you want help working out a split PO role in your unique context, contact us through the contact page on our website and we’ll talk about how we can support you on that.
Peter
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, and we’ll see you next time!
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