There can be only one

The Product Owner (PO) is the sole owner of a product. The PO is responsible for maintaining and developing the product and do this the best way possible. The whole team helps the product owner in the hard day to day decision making, because the whole team cares about the product and its customers. The PO can be seen as the face of the product in an organisation.

Many companies implement the role of PO in a very different manner. Let's have a look at a few:

1. The senior product owner: A senior product owner could be someone with a lot of experience and is therefore a senior. But in this implementation that is not the case. The role of SPO is a hierarchical position above the PO, which means the PO is not solely responsible for the product anymore. As an effect, the PO will not feel responsible and will loose focus, decreasing team performance.
2. The product owner team: make multiple people PO and thus responsible for prioritisation of the backlog. There will never be consensus and the POs will be played against each other. This leads to reducing focus and therefore low performance.
3. The product owner support team: Take one PO, and put people with the PO in a separate team to do the refinement, estimation, slicing and prioritisation. The PO is suddenly in two teams and the team gathering information about the stories is not the team implementing the change, which will reduce effectiveness.
4. The product owner by proxy: in this scenario a PO is not dedicated to the team thus appointing someone else as a replacement. The latter will never have the responsibility of a real PO and can never make hard decisions. In this case the PO by proxy sometimes just doesn't know what to do and will therefor delay development and speed.

In my opinion these are all constructs to redirect ownership and avoid responsibility for the true role of the Product Owner and will always result in a lower performance. The PO is the funnel with the business. Everyone demanding something from a PO is called a stakeholder. Even in a hierarchical organisation where a PO has a manager, the manager is a stakeholder to the PO when it comes to requests for the product. See here a potential conflict. 

So when a PO is the absolute ruler of the product, how can we make sure the PO doesn't do anything stupid? Well, we trust in our PO. As mentioned the PO is backed by the team, the PO is interested in the wishes, demands and quirks of the stakeholders and needs to make tough decisions sometimes in prioritising. And the PO, just like anyone else, makes mistakes. But mistakes cannot be prevented, just like a taxi driver will have a dent so now and then. We cannot prevent mistakes, but we can help the PO in making the damage as small as possible by creating a save environment where the PO has trust from everyone, autonomy to make the right decisions and authority on the product developed.

The power of Scrum is in it's simplicity. Make everything small and simple. The responsibility of the PO is also small and simple; there can be only one. 

If you have any PO constructs, please share in the comments.