Post #3528701

2026-06-01 07:10 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The product owner trap Context: The team has a product owner. She sits with the team, attends the standups, writes the user stories, and manages the backlog. She is good at her job, but she is not really making product decisions. She is translating decisions made by a business stakeholder who sits outside the team and controls the budget. The team builds what she tells them to build, being the proxy for the business which tells her to tell them. She does not really have the mandate to decide much. When the team raises a concern about direction, it goes to the PO, who raises it with the business, who considers it and comes back three weeks later with a modified brief. The team is a feature factory. Everyone knows it. Nobody knows what to do about it. OST explains: The product owner role, as conceived in Scrum, places a single person in charge of deciding what the team builds. That person is formally part of the team but functionally a conduit for management, the ordering-supplier divide between business and IT given a new job title. In OST terms, this is pure bureaucracy (DP1): responsibility for goal-setting sits above the work, even if it sits only one step above rather than many. A genuinely self-managing group in DP2 owns its whole task, not just how the work is done, but what work is done and why. That means the team has a genuine relationship with the customer and the business context, not a mediated one through a proxy. Marty Cagan's distinction between feature teams and empowered product teams maps almost exactly onto DP1 and DP2: in the former, the team is handed a solution to build, in the latter, it is given a problem to solve. The difference is not about process or methodology. It is about whether goal-setting lives inside or outside the group. Until that changes, the product owner is not empowering the team; she is the most visible evidence that it is not empowered. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-02 06:41

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Doing the wrong thing right Context: The organisation is focused on improvement. There are efficiency drives, process optimisations, restructuring programmes, and culture initiatives. Each quarter brings a new priority. The internal machinery is constantly being tuned. Meanwhile, the environment is changing. A new technology is reshaping customer expectations. A regulatory shift is coming. A competitor is doing something nobody has quite figured out yet. The people closest to these signals mention them in meetings, raise them in retrospectives, and flag them in Slack. The organisation processes them slowly, if at all. The improvement programmes continue. The internal machinery gets more refined. The gap between the organisation and its environment quietly widens. OST explains: Open systems theory makes a distinction that most management frameworks miss. The health of a system depends not only on its internal functioning but on the quality of its relationship with its environment. An organisation can be internally coherent, well-managed, and efficiently run while simultaneously drifting away from the environment it depends on. Emery and Trist's turbulent fields insight is relevant here: in a Type IV environment, the environment itself is in motion. An organisation that looks inward while the field moves becomes misaligned, not through any internal failure but simply through the passage of time. DP1 (bureaucracy) accelerates this, concentrating perception and decision-making at the top, seeing the environment through a narrow aperture. DP2 distributes that perceptual capacity across the whole system. Every group at the boundary imports a signal. All hands on deck. The organisation stays coupled to its environment not through a strategy process but through its structure. Peter Drucker distinguished between efficiency and effectiveness: there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Most improvement programmes are efficiency projects. OST asks the effectiveness question first. You cannot tune your way into relevance. The environment does not wait. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #SystemsThinking

Open ##3528700