Drucker's Blueprint - The Effective Product Owner Works Through Others

Peter Drucker is one of the founders of modern management theory. In 1959, He coined the term “Knowledge Worker” in the The Landmarks of Tomorrow. Then in 1967, he authored The Effective Executive a seminal work for today’s practice of management. In The Effective Executive, Drucker details the core challenges all executives face, such as discerning between truly unique problems that need a one-off solution, and those which should instead be solved as generic cases.

Executives must also evolve their processes, capturing and codifying individual, local optimizations into more effective and systemic wholes. In the first post of this series, I pointed out that this codifying of local optimizations is in effect the same as the work of the Effective Product Owner. In fact, there are several other overlaps between Drucker’s Effective Executive and an Effective Product Owner.

Consider how the Product Owner contributes to the team. The Product Owner is often a subject matter expert in the business domain. This knowledge lets them create the systemic whole mentioned earlier. But how does the Product Owner’s knowledge become impactful?

Knowing about the business isn’t enough to create the change. The Product Owner doesn’t know how to write software. Their knowledge doesn’t add value until others are using their new system! Instead, they must help a group of people, whose skills they do not share, to work and contribute together to a common goal.

The Product Owner’s Effectiveness is their ability to produce change in the business. And this effectiveness no longer depends on their own work. Instead, it depends on the work they can help others to do. Working effectively through others is another key skill of Drucker’s Effective Executive.

This practice resounds with influence-based leadership. The Product owner might once have been an expert contributor. Now they must develop a new skill to steward the effectiveness of their new team.

This is another overlap between Effective Product Ownership and Drucker’s Effective Executive. To be successful, the executive must work through others with different skills. The Product Owner must impart a common vision to the team. They must harness their team’s various strengths to pursue the shared goal. The Product Owner becomes a more Effective Executive by producing this alignment.