Lately, my wife and I have been bingeing Netflix’s “The Crown,” and it’s made me start to see some connections between the British monarchy and Agile– even though the British monarchy is about as “waterfall” as you can get.
In his book “The Professional Product Owner,” Ralph Jocham says this
I often draw the Product Owner with a crown […]. As a queen or king, you have the right to make all decisions regarding your kingdom. As long as you do a good job, your stakeholders will respect and even love you. If things go south for too long, you might face a revolution with dire consequences.
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This got me thinking: If a Product Owner is like a king or a queen, can we also say that a king or a queen is basically a Product Owner? When we look at the longest serving and probably best known monarch of our age, Queen Elizabeth II of England, can we look at her as an Owner of a Product and if so, what is that product?
To start to look at this question, we need to figure out what exactly is the queen’s role in Britain. The History Channel has this summary:
The Queen remains the head of British state, the highest representative of the United Kingdom on the national and international stage. The head of the British government, however, is the Prime Minister. One serves as a symbol of the country and the other serves as the chief executive of the government.
https://www.history.com/news/what-is-the-queens-role-in-british-government
So the role of the queen is representative and symbolic. She is not, strictly speaking, really necessary (as many Brits will probably agree, at least in private), but she supports “The Crown” as a product. I mentioned above that my wife and I have been watching “The Crown” lately. One interesting thing I notice is that my wife constantly gets the name of the show wrong, calling it “The Queen” instead. I think this is a very profound observation in a way – for many people the woman and the title are indistinguishable. The queen IS the Crown, and everything she does reflects that idea. In other words, her product is not so much tangible as it is an idea, a feeling that she inspires amongst her subjects. This is not unlike a movie theater, independence day celebrations, or Disneyland – all things you do to feel a certain way.
But despite castles and princes common to both, the queen is also different from Disneyland. The monarchy is hundreds of years old and has traditions that go back generations. If you think about it from a PO’s point of view, that’s a heck of a long time to accrue technical debt. And, oh boy, did the monarchy ever accrue it.
In 1957, the 2nd Baron Altrincham published an article lambasting how far removed the queen has become from her subjects. Luckily for the queen, Baron Altrincham had a few good ideas on how to remedy the situation, many of which the queen eventually adopted, like televising the annual Christmas address. This was by no means the first or the last time that the Crown was challenged for being “old fashioned,” “remote,” or “aloof.” These accusations have repeated throughout the reign of the queen, and they plague the Crown to this day.
Assuming that the queen truly wants to do best by her subjects and her product, why hasn’t she changed more to better suit her changing target audience? I would argue that she can’t. Decades and centuries of tradition, protocol, and in some cases law create a huge obstacle to innovation and change–exactly in the same way that technical debt hinders an organization’s ability to innovate, adapt, and bring new features to market.
New Product Owners who are hired to a very established and somewhat outdated product often find themselves fighting inertia, established practices, and technical debt in order to make changes happen. Many get frustrated by the fight and leave, claiming that the product or company is beyond hope. But I think that’s a lesson to take from Elizabeth: determination, drive, and time can transform even the crustiest of organizations. And maybe some funny hand waving helps too…
So, how good is the queen as a Product Owner? I’ll write about that next week in the second post of this series, “Princess Diana and the KVAs”
Want to talk more about the role of the Product Owner, the Crown (real or show), or anything else in the agile sphere? Drop me a line at boaz@makecodebetter.com, or through my linkedin page!