The Leadership Void — What Happens When Product Owners Forget They're Part of the Scrum Team | Nate Amidon

Nate Amidon: The Leadership Void — What Happens When Product Owners Forget They're Part of the Scrum Team

In this episode, we refer to Nate's previous BONUS episode on the brief-execute-debrief cycle and alignment.

The Great Product Owner: The Team Player Who Leads From the Trenches

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"The best product owners are really part of the team. They attend all the ceremonies, they give their daily stand-up status, they're shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches." - Nate Amidon

For Nate, the best product owners he's worked with share one defining trait: they act like teammates, not managers. They show up to daily stand-ups and report on what they worked on, what they completed, and what they're blocked on — just like everyone else. They listen to ideas from the team without being dismissive, recognizing that engineers often know the user just as well as they do. They don't treat the product owner role as a position of authority over the team, but as a different function within the same unit. Nate draws from his military background: leadership is "care and feeding of the people." When product owners internalize that the team's success is their success — when they feel genuine allegiance to the people they work with — backlogs get better organized, priorities become clearer, and collaboration happens naturally. As Vasco adds, alignment is the real purpose behind Scrum ceremonies, and when POs are there, alignment follows.

Self-reflection Question: As a product owner, do your team members see you as someone who is part of the team — or as someone the team works for?

The Bad Product Owner: The Leadership Void That Creates Corporate Game of Thrones

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"It eventually becomes a leadership void on the team that someone will step up and fill — and usually it's an engineer, or the Scrum Master becomes a quasi-product owner." - Nate Amidon

Nate views the product owner role as fundamentally a leadership position — leadership of the backlog, prioritization, and the connection between business needs and team execution. When a PO doesn't embrace that responsibility, the symptoms are predictable: throwing half-baked stories over the fence with a "just figure it out" attitude, constantly shifting priorities without considering the downstream impact on a team that just spent two weeks building something, and being absent from the daily conversations that keep everyone aligned. What follows is what Nate calls a "leadership void" — someone else on the team, often an engineer or the Scrum Master, steps in as a quasi-product owner because the work still needs direction. Meanwhile, without a PO acting as a filter, stakeholders start shoulder-tapping the team directly, competing directors play corporate Game of Thrones over whose priorities win, and the team gets whiplashed between conflicting demands. The biggest red flag? When you hear the team say: "We just did what you told us."

Self-reflection Question: If your product owner disappeared for two weeks, would anyone on the team notice a gap in leadership and direction — or has someone already quietly stepped in to fill that void?

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About Nate Amidon

Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.

You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.