Rotating Product Owners on established teams
Our organization has several established Scrum teams with Product Owners pulled from the business units based on their subject matter expertise (both product level and process level). When one product is complete, the business would like to swap out that product owner with another product owner to better align with the new product. The rest of the team (Dev members and ScrumMaster) would remain the same.
Does anyone have any experience with this paradign (changing product owners on established teams based on product expertise)? What works? What doesn't?
How often will POs change teams? I would expect some short term slowdown as the team gets used to working with the new PO. It will be important to do a short reset with the PO and team to review his or her vision, team building, review norms and working agreements, DoD, etc.
Instinctively it feels wrong to enforce changes on a successful team, but I think it's important to take an empirical approach.
What evidence does the business have that the change leads to a greater increase in the value being delivered?
It sounds like there are stable Development Teams in place, and that they are kept intact even when products change along with their owners. If so, then this arrangement could form the basis of a sustainable Scrum Studio.
It looks good to me to build on top of performing Dev Team. We all know it takes ages to grown such a team.
In French, we have a saying "We don't change a winning team", even if my bosses actually do the opposite in my company :-(
Be carefull not to swap to often. If this is the case, then your PO's are probably "fake" PO's and the actual PO is above these "Business Unit" PO's.
Thanks for the feedback! Organizationally, we are working to grow the capabilities of our Product Owners to be more strategic (versus simply prioritizers of the backlog).
What about having the PO work in collaboration with the SME for the new product? Every team is different, of course, but it may work better to keep the team together and have the PO do more homework to learn more about the new product.
@Curtis - that was my thought as well. Unfortunately, I think sometimes our mindset around POs is more towards the tactical and less towards the strategic.