Product Owner in Mid-Sized Companies: The Role That Decides Delivery

A product owner is accountable for the value of a product and decides which work is delivered in which order. In mid-sized companies the success of the role depends on who fills it: someone who takes it on as a side task and exercises it without decision authority administers a backlog and does not set the order of the work.

This article describes the role as set out in the 2020 Scrum Guide, shows who in a mid-sized company can sensibly take it on and gives you a maturity model for assessing your own staffing. It is written for managing directors and department heads who are introducing agile teams or already run them and notice that delivery is stalling.

What does a product owner do?

A product owner is the one person accountable for maximising the value of the product that results from the work of the Scrum Team. That is how the 2020 Scrum Guide puts it. In concrete terms the role owns the product backlog: the product owner develops and communicates the product goal, creates the items, puts them in order and makes sure the backlog is visible and understood by everyone.

Two points in the Guide deserve particular attention in mid-sized companies. First, the product owner may delegate tasks to others, but the accountability stays with the product owner. Second, a single person fills the role, and a committee cannot. Anyone who wants a change to the backlog persuades the product owner, who then decides. This sounds obvious, yet it contradicts the established practice of many firms, in which sales and production push their concerns through escalation paths.

The product owner is thus the interface between business result and delivery. The role turns the expectations of customers and business units into a single sequence and says no to everything that has no place in that sequence. That the role decides delivery follows from a simple mechanic: every priority that has not been decided clearly ends up as a disruption in the sprint.

Who should become product owner in a mid-sized company?

In a mid-sized company the product owner should be an employee with knowledge of the product, access to customers and authority over budget and scope, who has a fixed share of time for the role. In practice the choice falls on three types, which can be told apart by criteria.

The department head brings the knowledge but rarely the time. The technical lead knows the solution but often not the market. A dedicated product role brings time and focus but needs explicitly granted authority, or it remains a job title. If the product touches several departments, the dedicated role has the stronger case. If it sits within one department, a department head with a clear time share fits.

How much time does a product owner need?

A product owner needs as much time as the decisions in the backlog demand, and teams typically stall when the role is allotted leftover time. Plan fixed blocks before each sprint planning, for coordination with customers and business units, and for the sprint review. Availability matters most: questions from the team need an answer within one working day, because every open question halts work.

The Scrum Guide names no blanket percentage. It requires that accountability for value lies clearly with one person and leaves it to the organisation to provide the capacity. A practical test is whether the product owner can still fill the role in the busiest week of their daily business. If the answer is no, the staffing is too thin.

Five typical mis-staffings

Five patterns recur in mid-sized companies, and each shows itself through symptoms.

1. The secretary: the product owner writes down what business units demand and does not prioritise. The backlog grows into a wish list.
2. The committee: a group of department heads decides jointly. Decisions take long and end as compromises that satisfy nobody.
3. The go-between without authority: the product owner passes questions upwards. The team waits, and the managing director decides in the end anyway.
4. The project manager in new clothes: the role administers dates and tasks while nobody answers for the benefit. Completion is measured, and impact goes unnoticed.
5. The part-time role: the product owner spends three days a week elsewhere. The team works on assumptions, and queries turn into waiting time.

All five share one trait: the role exists formally and does not decide in practice. The consequences show in delivery as long waits before sprint planning, a backlog with no order and teams that pick their work by the loudest request. How you secure the quality of results is covered in the article on the Definition of Done.

How mature is the role in your company?

The following maturity model helps you place your staffing. Assess each product area separately, since maturity differs from team to team.

Whoever newly staffs the role usually starts at level 1 or 2. The step to level 3 is the most important and depends on one decision by the executive team: it gives the product owner sole authority over order and scope and then keeps to that. Without this commitment the role stays at level 2, regardless of training courses or certificates.

How the role connects to releases and deadlines

The product owner is also the person who commits to dates with customers and the executive team. The commitment is based on the team's capacity and the order in the backlog. How both turn into commitments that hold is shown in the article on release planning. Anyone reviewing the role after a first year with Scrum will find typical findings in the article Scrum in mid-sized companies.

Product owner and delivery management with Niehues Consulting

Niehues Consulting is a consultancy for AI management and organisational design from a delivery perspective, based in Düsseldorf. Founder Marin Niehues builds organisations that deliver and brings new products and technology into operations, in projects from VC-funded scale-ups to DAX 40 groups and in more than 20 countries on six continents. In the service area of delivery management, Niehues Consulting works as delivery manager, as project manager and as product owner, and designs the organisation in which these roles operate.

The approach follows the Niehues Delivery Model with the phases of understanding, building and rolling out. Two of its test questions matter most for staffing the product owner role: who decides, who delivers, who uses? Which roles and decision paths does operations need? Scope and terms of an engagement are discussed in the free initial consultation, which you can arrange in 30 minutes through the contact form.