Learning to say “no” to stakeholders, a critical PO lesson | Sarah Finn

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Product Owners that learn to be available to the team, and need to learn to say “no” to stakeholders are the two aspects of product ownership we talk about in this PO episode. 

The Great Product Owner: Helping PO’s learn to work with the Scrum team

Great Product Owners are able to make time to talk with the teams, and to be available when they have questions, and topics to discuss. But we should not forget that part of our job as Scrum Masters is to make sure the PO fully understands their role in the team. 

In this segment, we refer to the results of the PO survey we ran a few years back, which lists the 7 most common Product Onwer anti-patterns. 

The Bad Product Owner: Learning to say “no” to stakeholders, a critical PO lesson

The toughest part of the PO job is to be able to say “no” so that the team (and the PO) can focus on the right things for the product and the customer. When a PO is unable to push back, and say “no” to stakeholders, many anti-patterns develop. The reason is simple: there are always many, many ideas of what could be done, but most will never add value to the product and customers. 

Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.

About Sarah Finn

Sarah Finn is an Agile Coach, within an Agile Practice Team in Red Hat. Sarah currently works with an open-source community facing team called "The Community Platform Engineering Team". Sarah also helps co-manage the Agile DevOps Community of Practice. Sarah believes by simply creating a safe environment for discussion & collaboration can open up so many opportunities to work together towards continuous improvement.

You can link with Sarah Finn on LinkedIn and connect with Sarah Finn on Twitter.