There can only be one product owner – reply on harvesting developer intelligence

I got a very interesting reply on my latest blog post concerning the harvesting of the passion of the developers. Kevin E. Schlabach rightly pointed out that you could misinterpret my suggestion to leave some time for developer’s own initiatives and ideas.

So, just to make it clear; product owners can, if they think that the developers have great ideas, keep this in mind and when scheduling deliveries, leave some slack so if a developer comes up with a great idea, you as a product owner can choose to prioritize this. As Kevin points to, this is not up to the developer to decide. He can come with suggestions just like stakeholders, but just like everyone else, he cannot decide on priorities.

I’ve also been in situations where developers have thought up an idea and just started working on that instead of the stuff that needed to be done. To be frank, I’ve had some serious problems with this and finally had to take very drastic steps to end this, so I know that this is an important and serious problem. Serious, since other stuff isn’t being done, and dangerous since cheating in a team in contagious. It spreads to the other developers.

When you instead harvest the developer’s ideas you place them on the backlog like everything else. But I do like to make the guys happy sometimes and push up something on the priority list if it’s a really good idea and something which is truly valuable to the customer. But as a product owner, I am responsible, and it’s my decision to take.

Thanks, Kevin, for pointing to the risks for misunderstanding of my point of view. Keep the comments coming! I’m agile in point of view.