I have spent more than 20 years of my career training and coaching agile, Scrum and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), to hundreds of teams and thousands of team members. I have upskilled hundreds Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Many of my students were also certified by me.
Many senior executives have received my personal guidance and consulting on:
- how to shift from project/program-centric organizations to product-centric organizations
- how to improve HR and budgeting processes to ensure better organizational agility
- how to improve time to market and business resilience
I want to pursue the role of a Product Owner/Product Manager with any organization that is interested in maintaining and promoting top quality product ownership, from within. This is one of the ‘weakest areas’ in agile adoptions.
If I assume the role of a product owner /product manager role, not only will I be able to lead by example and help other people, in the same role, perform their functions better, I can also take on the responsibility of delivering Product Discovery & Business Agility Workshop to the rest of an organization.
In a long run, this could also save companies a lot of money and spare them from frustration of dealing with ineffective, watered-down coaching and deck-driven-training.
If your company (e.g. revenue center/business unit/LOB) is interested in this experiment (btw, it could become a permanent solution), please reach out directly.
This could be very fruitful and full of fun journey!
As a disclaimer, my personal standing advice has always been: “Do not hire Product Owners. Instead, select appropriate internal people to assume this critical role“. Why? Because, PO/PM skills could be learned relatively fast, whereas proper organizational empowerment and business knowledge – is a much tougher journey and it is best if someone with an established organizational position assumes the role. However, majority of companies have not done a great job of properly selecting and empowering POs/PMs, by giving it to BAs-“team-level PO-proxies”. This is the problem we need to fix and an experienced coach and trainer can be effective in doing this.