How Did We Ever Get By Without a Product Owner?

When I first started working with Scrum teams, one of the things that struck me most was the Product Owner accountability. The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product. It is simple but profound - they are ultimately accountable for the value that the product delivers. They achieve this by deciding where we are going (the product vision) putting together a strategy for how we will get there (the Product Backlog, including the Product Goal) and tracking our progress towards the Product Goal (the roadmap, metrics).

The Product Owner ensures that the product's direction is in alignment with overall company objectives. They are in the "hot seat" in that they are balancing the needs of stakeholders, customers, and their own strategy for how to maximize value.

How did we ever get by without them?

What did we do before?

Before Agile, many organizations had more of a matrix approach to ownership of the product. What I mean is that in many cases, there may have been several different people responsible for different aspects of a product.

Take the example of a company selling products online. This hypothetical website might have been influenced by various executives and departments. Marketing might push for one feature, sales another, operations something else. You might have an IT director who owned ensuring the website worked technically, and you might have many different business stakeholders pushing for different things from the website. The result was a patchwork of competing priorities, with no single person accountable for ensuring that the team’s day-to-day work supported the overall business strategy.

In this example, work would be typically managed as a series of projects. Each project would have its scope, budget, and timeline. Success was measured by whether the project was delivered with the original scope, with the original budget and timeline. When the project was over, rarely did anyone step back to ask: did this project actually achieve the outcome we were hoping for?

When the answer was “no,” the response wasn’t to adapt the existing product. Instead, organizations often launched a brand new, monolithic project to try again.

Agile and the Rise of the Product Owner

Agile—and Scrum in particular—changed that. Scrum includes a Product Owner who is accountable for maximizing the value of the Product. They ensure that the product vision, goal and product backlog aligns with larger company objectives. They work with the Scrum team to deliver a valuable increment of usable product each Sprint. They measure customer outcomes frequently and adapt the Product Backlog based on feedback from stakeholders and customers. If something isn’t working, the team can pivot before pouring months—or years—into the wrong solution. Scope isn't fixed, but instead the team adapts quickly to new information as the market reacts to frequent releases of usable product.

Accountability for Value

What I find so remarkable about this shift is the introduction of clear accountability for product value. In the pre-Agile world, accountability often stopped at scope, budget, and schedule. Whether the project actually created value was almost an afterthought.

With Scrum, the Product Owner changes that. The Product Owner is accountable for outcomes, not just outputs. And that accountability brings discipline. It forces organizations to ask not just, did we deliver what we said we would?  but also, did we have a positive impact on customer outcomes?

Conclusion

Looking back, it boggles the mind that companies used to operate without the Product Owner accountability. Projects came and went, budgets were spent, and timelines were met—yet customer needs and business goals were often missed.

The Product Owner role ensures that doesn’t happen. By holding someone accountable for maximizing product value, Scrum bridges the gap between what teams build and what customers (and organizations) truly need.

And once you’ve experienced working in a world with a clear Product Owner, it’s hard to imagine going back.