From Desk-Pounding to Harmony — How the Game of Go Transformed a Violent Product Owner, and Why Every Employee Should Think Like an Owner | Peter Merel

Peter Merel: From Desk-Pounding to Harmony — How the Game of Go Transformed a Violent Product Owner, and Why Every Employee Should Think Like an Owner

In this episode, we refer to The Agile Way by Peter Merel and The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack.

The Great Product Owner: The Real Estate Visionary Who Built Channels of Learning

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.

"When a product owner brings an attitude of learning together, it doesn't just create psychological safety — it creates an active experimental mindset and a network of trust relationships that support each other in the learning process." - Peter Merel

The best product owner Peter has worked with is Ben White, one of three brothers and partners in Ray White — Australia's largest property management business, started by Ben's great-grandfather. Ben had a vision for transforming how property management works across the entire Australian industry. To realize this vision, he tried to bring an app to market — and failed. Not once, but twice, before succeeding on the third attempt. What made Ben exceptional wasn't his persistence alone, but that each failure became an opportunity to learn how to approach the problem differently. The product he finally brought to market was informed by all of that learning. Ben's real genius, Peter explains, is his ability to establish channels of learning — trust relationships that flow not just through the technical team, but throughout the entire business and back into product development. Without those trust relationships, psychological safety alone isn't enough. Peter also emphasizes that the product owner should be a servant leader, and points to Jack Stack's open book management model where every employee is motivated to think and act as a business owner. When everyone understands that the future of the business is their future, they all collaborate as product owners — and the need for desk-pounding disappears entirely.

Self-reflection Question: How many channels of learning does your product owner currently have — and are there trust relationships in the organization that could become active channels but haven't been tapped yet?

The Bad Product Owner: The Violent Visionary Who Didn't Understand Collaboration

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 problem isn't the role of product owner. The problem is the relationship between product owner and everybody else." - Peter Merel

At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter worked with a business executive who drove the development of a digital product that generated $2 billion in business for the bank. By any business measure, this person was extraordinarily successful. But as a product owner, he was terrible. He pounded desks, went red in the face, insisted that everything the team was doing was wrong, didn't trust anyone, and couldn't be trusted either. The core anti-pattern wasn't the shouting itself — it was that this person didn't understand what a collaborative relationship needed to be. Peter found a creative solution: he taught the executive the game of Go. Go rewards harmony — you lose by being too passive, and you lose by being too aggressive. Through Go, Peter taught the executive to create prompting questions, to work through others so they would carry concerns into meetings, and to provide answers rather than demands. Once the executive saw that collaboration was a more effective way to realize his own vision — faster, better, and more reliably — the behavior changed completely. The insight Peter shares is that before coaching behavior, you sometimes have to prove the business case for collaboration itself.

In this segment, we refer to The Agile Way by Peter Merel, which Peter now gives to product owners as a framework for understanding collaborative relationships.

Self-reflection Question: When you encounter a product owner who leads through demands rather than collaboration, have you considered showing them that collaboration is actually a faster path to getting what they want?

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About Peter Merel

Credited in the first agile book (XP Embraced), keynoted the first agile conference, invented the first agile training game, founded the xscale alliance, authored the agile way, Peter developed software by hand for forty years, coached agile in person for twenty years, and is working now to revolutionize the AI alignment landscape.

You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.