“Backing up” a good product owner

One of the key players in most successful agile projects is a product owner, at least in Codeborne’s practice. Our practice stretches for more than 15 years, during which we have successfully delivered over 100 projects.

A good product owner has a very high value to the organization, project, and team. Everyone is so used to having that person’s expertise around.

What happens when a product owner leaves the company? The true value of that person may be revealed just then, often too late. We have been in this situation more than once. Together with our customers, of course.

In one instance, when a longtime product owner had left, and to make matters worse, half of our team had been recently changed as well, we ended up initiating the knowledge base restart together with the customer.

We started visualizing the credit decision-making process on a single diagram, which is generated by the code. That became the new joint knowledge base - for us and for the customer’s teams.

That was an eye-opening experience, which provoked several process improvements and simplifications because visualization revealed several inefficiencies and not logical steps for the customer. Or things “from history” where the “best before” had long been passed.

We built this initially for one country. Very soon, when the other teams saw it, we got a request to do it for the other country as well.

And so we continue keeping the diagrams up to date all the time. Keeping the knowledge within the organization. And extracting extra value on top of that.