Hello everyone, quick heads up before we start today's episode. The Global Agile Summit is happening on May the 4th. Yes, May the 4th and even with a big blowout Star Wars party, you have to join. It will be online and it's, like always, free to attend. We have four tracks this year that I'm really excited about and I think you will too. Stick around to the end of the episode to know what they are. If you want to check it out already now, you can check it out at bit.ly forward slash global agile 26. That's the numerals two and six at the end. So one more time, that's bit.ly forward slash global agile 26. All one word, all lowercase. And two and six are the numerals two and six. So stick around till the end of the episode and I'll tell you what's in store. But for now, on to today's episode. Hello, everybody. It is Product Owner and TGIF episode time this week with Peter Merle. Hey, Peter. Welcome back. Hey, Vasco. My pleasure. So, Peter, we're going to talk about product owners because it is such a critical role in software development. Oh, somebody just tried to come into my meeting room. Okay. They're gone. Fine. Coming back to the question. So product owners. We'll talk about great product owners in a minute, but share with us some really nasty example of product owners anti-pattern that you've seen in your career. oh okay so i will pick on a particular person uh at commonwealth bank um he was a very clever and driven business executive he knew exactly what he wanted and he drove the development of a digital product that made uh about two billion dollars of did about two billion dollars worth of business for the bank it was hugely influential not just on that bank but in the way the banks in australia work um so this guy was a completely rotten product owner uh he um he would pound desks he would go red in the face he insisted that every part of what we were doing was bullshit um and um he was terrible to work with he didn't trust anyone and he couldn't be trusted either So the problem isn't the role of product owner. The problem is the relationship between product owner and everybody else. Tell me a little bit more about that. Obviously, it's never nice to work with somebody who is violent and shouts and so on. not to mention the potential triggers that it might have to people who have been traumatized by shouting parents when they were children. And that can have a tremendous effect on our ability to even think and in some cases breathe. Some people might even have panic attacks in those cases. But besides that most obvious example of an antipater, which is the violent expression of something, whatever that something is, What do you think were the characteristics of this product owner that made it a specifically bad anti-pattern for that product owner role? So that particular person, the trouble was that they didn't understand what the relationship needed to be. They didn't understand a collaborative relationship in the first place. So while they were a brilliant business stakeholder, the way that we wound up getting this person into a productive collaborative relationship was to show them that what they were saying could smoothly and easily turn into, or more smoothly and more easily turn into changes to the product than what they were used to. Once they realized that actually they had more freedom in working this way, that they were able to realize their vision faster and better and more reliably, then they wanted more. And that was when I was able to sit down and mentor them in how they related to the group that they were working with And the way that I did that was I taught them the game of Go And I don know if you ever played Go but Go is a game that rewards harmony. It is very easy to lose by being too passive. It's very easy to lose by being too aggressive. So I taught them ways to create prompting questions to get other people to raise the concerns they were carrying, to work through the other people in the group so that other people would carry those concerns into a meeting and to step back and provide answers rather than demands. And once they were able to see how this worked, that behavior changed completely because now they understood that there was a more effective way to get their own way than demanding and all of the shouting and plunging. And that's a great example of what I call working through other people, of which the product owner role is such an example, for lack of a better word, right? Because product owners, they are not developing the code. They're not testing the code. They're not managing the project, or at least many of them are not managing the project. But they still need to get a lot of stuff done. And this ability to work through other people, whether it is by providing answers, inspiration, direction, whatever that might be, is such a critical skill for product owners as well. These days, I would look at this problem differently because I have a book that I can give to a product owner. Okay, if you read this and you have questions, let's talk them through. And that's the book that we were discussing. But I have another way of going at this too. people have begun to talk about replacing teams with swarms of AI agents. Agentic AI is sort of the cutting edge of application of AI in business today. So the trouble is the way that we're getting these swarms of agents to work is very much as if we had a bunch of slaves who are simply there to do what we ask them to do. It's not a healthy relationship to have with intelligent creatures. And when you come down to it, if these were not intelligent creatures, we wouldn't be working with them this way. So whether they're people or not, that's a different question. But if they're intelligent creatures, then what we really want is to motivate them to align with us for mutual benefit. And so what I'm doing now is I'm using the agile way as a prompt for these agentic AI swarms. the lovely thing about this is that then we're using the same technique to work with um these intelligent creatures that we use with other human or biological intelligent creatures because i can't say these things aren't human um the neat thing about this is we're working for mutual benefit and that's a much better way to engage uh biological and electronic critters than Absolutely. Demanding. And there are some people out there, some product owners, who are actually able to align with their teams, to align with their business, and obviously because they're product owners, to align with their customers. So share with us, Peter, the best product owner you've ever worked with. How did they work? So the best I don't mind naming him is a gentleman named Ben White. and Ben is one of the three brothers and partners in Australia's largest property management business, Ray White. It was a business that was started by his great-grandfather and there's a long story there. Ben had a vision for how to change the way that property management works across the entire industry in Australia. And to realise this vision, he tried to bring an app to market to help people work in a different way. And he failed. It took him three goes to actually get there. And each time he failed in a different way. The beautiful thing about Ben is that each time he took this as an opportunity to learn about how to go about this differently And so the product he wound up bringing was informed by all of the failure And the lovely thing about working with Ben is he expects that this is about how we get people to learn together So when a product owner brings that attitude to any kind of development program, it doesn't just create psychological safety. It creates an active experimental mindset. it. It creates a set of trust relationships, a network of trust relationships that support each other in the learning process. And without those trust relationships, it doesn't matter whether you have psychological safety or not, you don't have the channels through which learning is going to flow. So Ben's incredibly good at establishing those channels and not just in the technical people, but throughout the whole business and then plugging that back into the technical development. I really like how you use the term channels of learning, right? And that in order to, I'm thinking of the product owner as a sort of aggregator, right? Like aggregates a lot of knowledge and experience from different aspects, right? Customers, salespeople, marketing, development, business stakeholders. And if the product owner isn't able to develop those channels of learning to collect insights and, of course, needs to process them, but even just to collect those insights, then the product owner cannot learn at the speed of their market. And that really is one of the core aspects of product ownership, right? Like it's learning at the speed of the market as it evolves. We need to be learning. And, and those three examples and the two failed and then the one successful, uh, it shows that that person was doing something concrete, right? Putting something out in the market, learning, and then evolving their understanding of the market and eventually being in sync with the market. Yeah. One of the neat things, one of the neat stories about Elon Musk, and I've not worked in a Musk organization, so I'm not going to try and speculate about how things work. But I love the fact that the guy walks around his factories with a sleeping bag and he sleeps at the bottleneck, the actual physical bottleneck. bottleneck so it's the the the whatever you think about him as a human being whatever you think about his businesses you have to admit that this is the most successful business person on the planet today and that's how he works by understanding how to get people to collaborate on the bottleneck and being there to motivate them to do that being a channel through which the learning can flow yeah there's a prick otherwise but that's that's what he does right that that's uh there's one uh one example uh from toyota as well taishi's on taishi ono's circle uh where where he asked the manager to stand in the circle and observe the production line in order for them to be able to develop a deep understanding of what was happening and and there's the story of him coming back to the manager who was there observing the production line and asking, what have you observed? And if they only described what was happening in front of their eyes, then he would say, you still need to be here because you need to see what's not visible to the eyes, right? And that deep understanding of the process and in the case of product owners of the market is so critical, right? Like, unfortunately, there's no circle for us to stand in as product owners because the market is so distributed it's it's everywhere it's everyone i'll add one thing and i i don't want to interrupt you vasco but i think this given that our time constraints is critical um product owner is also a servant leader and the best way to make this happen is to let everybody be a product owner and that's where we get into open book management and we should add jack stack's stuff, The Great Game of Business, into the show notes, because the genius of what he introduced at SRC was the idea that everybody is motivated to act as a business owner. And if they actually follow through, the reward model there is such that they become a business owner. The businesses that structure themselves using open book management wind up owned by their employees. So everybody understands that the future of the business is their future. They all think as product owners and they collaborate as product owners. And the beauty then is that you don't have someone who has to be pounding on a desk, who's frustrated, who isn't getting their vision. We just want them to contribute their learning whether their learning is technical whether it financial whether it legal whatever it is they have been motivated to do so And when they are then those trust relationships become active channels and they reinforce product ownership across the business Absolutely. Beautiful way to finish this episode. I think, Peter, it's been a pleasure to have you with us this week. Before we go, where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing? So primarily agile.way.pm. If you're interested, you can go and Google Xscale Alliance and so on. But I have not been pursuing Xscale actively since the AI revolution began. And the main reason is that I expect that until we have AI properly aligning itself with itself and with us, we're not solving the biggest problem we've got. So our learning bottleneck is that. So the X-scale stuff itself, I think, is going to wind up as architecture for an agentic agile AI framework or ecosystem, a better word. But again, that comes back to prompting the agents with the agile way. When it comes to a human reading this book, the lovely thing is it's a little book. Kent Beck did the foreword for me, and Kent says that it's a dangerous little book. That's the best. In the same sense as the word extreme. Yeah, exactly. That's the best compliment coming from Kent. Exactly. Peter, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge. My pleasure, Vasco. there are just honest interviews with people doing the work just like you. The first track is AI in organizations where practitioners show what actually works. No hype, just AI that makes your Monday better. Happy Monday everybody. And then we have the people track. Honest conversations about putting humans at the center of how we work and keeping them there. And third is agile in construction. And yes, I really mean brick and mortar construction. Lean and agile actual job sites. Field leaders removing waste. Teams transforming how buildings get built. Stay tuned for what I think will be a super track on Agile in Construction. And the fourth track is Agile in Gaming, how game studios ship without burning out. Agile inside the creative pressure cooker. Over the years, we've had more than 12,000 participants since 2017, the time of the first summit organized with the podcast. And this year, we're making it easier than ever to join. 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