Yes, that title is supposed to sting a little. It is also accurate, and so I wanted to expand upon my recent engagement.
I was working with an internal IT product group recently. Smart people. Experienced engineers. Thoughtful leaders. The goal was clear: organize teams around outcomes instead of outputs.
Everyone agreed in principle.
Then we tried to apply it, and the conversation immediately drifted into features, stories, and delivery mechanics. That is when you know something upstream is broken.
This is not a team problem. It is a product-operating-model problem.
Product operating models organize around value
In an agile product operating model, teams and backlogs are organized around value streams or product streams, not projects, systems, or roles.
When that happens, stakeholders finally have a fighting chance to prioritize. They are not choosing between tickets (or worse, tickets that belong to business units they don’t even relate to). They are choosing between business problems.
When it does not happen, every backlog becomes a grab bag of "important" work, and everything feels equally urgent. Prioritization turns into negotiation, escalation, or silence.
That is not because stakeholders do not care. It is because the system is not giving them clarity.
The Product Owner's actual responsibility
A Product Owner's primary job is not writing user stories.
It is helping the business clearly articulate:
- What problem we are trying to solve
- Why it matters
- Who it impacts
- How we will know if we have actually solved it
That last part is the one most organizations skip.
If you cannot describe how success will be measured, you do not have a product decision. You have a guess wrapped in a feature.
Internal IT and the proxy Product Owner reality
Internal IT groups live in a messy middle ground.
The "real" product owners are usually business leaders with full-time operational responsibilities. Their day job is running the business, not owning a backlog. So organizations introduce proxies, often business analysts or delivery leads, to close the gap.
That can be a practical move.
But it is important to be honest about it. Proxy product ownership is a temporary bridge, not the destination.
Proxies can facilitate, translate, and keep flow moving. What they cannot do is replace business accountability for prioritization and acceptance.
Do business Product Owners really need training?
Here is the uncomfortable question.
Do business leaders really need to be trained to articulate their problems?
They already understand where money is made, where risk lives, and where delays hurt. They feel the consequences directly.
What is usually missing is not knowledge. It is expectation.
If a business stakeholder cannot plainly say:
- "This is the problem I am experiencing"
- "This is why it matters more than other problems right now"
- "This is what will be different if we fix it"
Then delegating that thinking to teams does not make it go away. It just defers the cost.
And deferred clarity always shows up later, as rework, missed outcomes, and frustration on all sides.
When teams are forced to guess
When business problems are not clearly articulated, teams default to what they can control.
They write user stories. They break down features. They optimize delivery mechanics. It looks productive, but it is largely defensive behavior.
Teams are not failing. They are compensating.
User stories become a crutch because the intent is not clear. Velocity becomes a comfort metric because impact is not defined. Everyone stays busy while the real problem remains unsolved.
User stories are not the villain
User stories are not the enemy.
They are just not a substitute for thinking.
A well-written user story without a clearly articulated business problem is still waste. It is simply organized and estimated waste.
Stories should express intent in service of a measurable outcome. When they are asked to create that intent, something has already gone wrong.
The price of delegated clarity
When business stakeholders leave problem definition to delivery teams, they do not avoid work. They postpone it.
Eventually someone asks, "Why did this not deliver what we expected?"
The answer is almost always the same: because no one ever agreed on what "success" meant.
Agile does not remove the need for clarity. It exposes when it is missing.
And if you cannot articulate the business problem, you are not really acting as the Product Owner, regardless of what the org chart says.
You are asking teams to guess.
And guessing is expensive.
What to do on Monday morning
Pick one item from your backlog. Ask these four questions:
- What business problem does this solve?
- Why does it matter more than other problems right now?
- Who is impacted if we do not solve it?
- How will we measure success?
If you cannot answer all four, you do not have a product decision. You have a feature request.
The most expensive way to validate if you built the right thing is to build it. We shouldn't have to train the real product owner to articulate the problem well; it should be staring them and their business stakeholders down every day or its not a priority IMO.