Why Some Products Fail: Lack of Product Owner
Mike Achilles
AI Strategy | Agile Execution | Driving Digital Innovation | Entrepreneur
Why do products fail? One big reason is the lack of product ownership. Over the years, as a technologist, I’ve been involved in countless projects, and there’s a trend I see far too often: teams are built without a clear “product owner.”
Here’s what typically happens: great ideas surface, sometimes even with investors on board, but there’s no one to truly take ownership of the product. Without someone to build and prioritize a backlog of features, developers are left to piece things together from vague concepts tossed around in meetings. There’s often no direct interaction with customers, no feedback from sales or marketing, and no clear vision tying everything together.
On one project, the development team was asked to build a system to show dynamic ads based on a customer’s browsing history. The tech was cutting-edge—predicting what customers might buy before they even knew it themselves. The developers, being the rock stars they are, ran with the idea. They collaborated with designers, built impressive features, and delivered something truly ingenious.
But here’s the kicker: no one knew what to do with it.
There was no product owner to bridge the gap between development, marketing, and sales. The marketing team wasn’t looped in on the feature’s value, so there was no plan to launch it. The sales team had no idea how to sell it or which customers might want it. Ultimately, the product sat unused—a brilliant idea with no direction.
This is where a product owner makes all the difference. A product owner is the glue that holds everything together. They know the customer inside and out, work with sales and marketing to align on goals, and ensure the entire team is moving in the same direction. Without a product owner, teams end up guessing—guessing who the customer is, how valuable a feature might be, and what should come next.
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Without a product owner:
A product owner is critical to the success of any product or service launch, whether it’s in technology, manufacturing, or services. If your team doesn’t have a product owner, it’s time to make that change.
If you’re not sure what a product owner’s role should look like or how to optimize it for success, let’s chat. I’d be happy to help you build better products and bring them to market faster.
Michael Achilles Let’s Connect
Experienced Agile Team Leader
6 年So my team ran into this issue and still continues to struggle. I felt nervous about our goals and how we would achieve them without a PO managing our backlog. Early on when joining the team, I scheduled a “Scrum 101” to help the team understand the foundations of scrum, roles, etc. Only 2 team members joined everyone else blew me off and said if they weren’t receiving a scrum certification they were not attending my little overview. So couple more months went by and I could tell that the ambiguity was getting worse. In a post-scrum discussion I brought up the need for a product owner and technical lead. Team members volunteered and we have those roles now but am still struggling to get our PO to create a backlog. I still have to do it myself and wrestle with my own role since the SM and PO are conflicting roles. This has been my most challenging role yet in my career bc this is DevOps team and I came to it without any knowledge on DevOps, undefined roles and resistance to understand why we need a backlog! ??