In our eyes, not having empowered Product Owners is the single biggest impediment to working agile. Now, we can hear you, dear manager, saying: “I will not empower a Product Owner to be product accountable if they currently don’t have the competencies (such as “sufficient” stakeholder management skills) to carry it”.

If your Product Owner is not capable of living up to the product accountability, then you’ve simply hired the wrong person for the job (or you should start investing in building the skills immediately).

It’s a full-time job to be on top of the product in order to fully live up to the product accountability, so how, in some organizations, a manager can be product accountable while also being accountable for developing their people, spreading the agile culture and coaching their superiors is a mystery to us. 

Let’s also remember that the full product accountability doesn’t sit with just the Product Owner, but with the whole Scrum Team who, together, ensure the proper value-add and quality of their product.