Unicorns wanted: Navigating the Product Owner shortage in IT

This article was co-authored by Kira Kessel, Associate at Metis Strategy.

You’ve seen the virtues of transforming from a project to a product operating model: value-driven work, delivered by dedicated teams rather than through projects led by disparate team members.

But as you embark on this transformation, you’ll have to remember one thing: you can’t do it without a product owner. The strategist, the technical expert, the business savvy leader—those with all three commonly called unicorns, or rock stars—is a person not easy to find.

Why are they unicorns?

Product owners are the linchpin of the product operating model; on product teams, a bad engineer is one bad apple, but a bad PO can sour the whole batch. No one else has the end-to-end accountability for a product like the product owner does. No one else so consistently represents customer interests, pushes engineers to adopt DevOps and Agile methodologies, and corrals individuals to execute against a roadmap. This is a leader who thinks of technical features in one conversation and business strategy in the next. The unicorn, if not sourced with proper due diligence, will be viewed only as a creature in fairy tales.

Fine. But why is the product owner so important?

In a traditional project model, a leader is judged based on how well they react to requests and executes on them. In a product model, however, a good product owner anticipates the customer needs and responds to them by prioritizing items on a roadmap based on the capacity of a product team.  

Product owners move you from reactive to proactive.

Adopting the product model is no meager mind-shift. Broadly speaking, you have two main options: hiring or upskilling.

Hire.

You might hire for either of two reasons. The first is that you may not have the luxury of time and mistakes. This is largely a matter of two things: culture and industry. 

Let’s start with culture. Ask the following of your company: Is learning tolerated? Is training available? Are there resources you can use to help establish the person in their role? Is there strong leadership and mentorship? Without these variables at play it will be difficult to develop someone internally. You might need someone who has the core PO competencies and fits your culture, someone who perhaps already has the leadership chops you’re lacking—a necessary hire.

Then there’s industry. Also unable to afford time or mistakes are those industries that are heavily regulated, scrutinized by agencies and governments, or uniquely depended upon by their customers. If, for example, you work in medical, military, aviation, and so on, you may not want to risk upskilling when you need someone who can navigate complexities beyond just those inherent to a product owner’s role. These product owners will have to consider certain variables—safety, cybersecurity, geopolitical factors, and many others—that require extra attention when representing the voice of the customer. 

Say you’re a technology executive at a biopharma company. Your product owner will not only need to drive innovation—putting the most promising features at the top of the backlog—but will also need to do this while adhering to regulatory constraints. For Shobie Ramakrishnan, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at GlaxoSmithKline, this looks like balancing core values like “accountable for impact” with the pursuit of AI/ML technologies to “supercharge” R&D and clinical trials.

Luxury and time, of course, is only one of the reasons you might hire. The other is that you want a fresh perspective. In particular, someone who offers a point of view you can’t train. Usually that someone comes with a mixed bag of experience: a background in product, engineering, marketing, and finance are most common. What matters is that they offer something new to your company. A leader like this may disrupt the status quo, bring innovation, and offer new ways of thinking about the same problem. They may even serve as a catalyst for change beyond your recent move to the product model.

But could you not solve these issues—the constraints of luxury and time and the desire for a fresh perspective—by outsourcing? Your contractor may not cost as much, but you may face bigger drawbacks. A contractor who doesn’t stick around will take with them the skills and experience you want an employee to share with colleagues so that expertise, new ideas, and growth of the company reinforce one another from within.

In contrast, when you retain someone full time, especially a product owner, you retain institutional knowledge, which is especially valuable when it concerns strategic areas like GenAI, data, cyber and other innovation—areas of central concern to the product owner. A good example of this comes from Zurich North America’s COO Berry Perkins, who has made it part of IT strategy to keep this type of knowledge in-house. Of course, that’s not the only part of the strategy—it also involved the establishment of nearshore competency centers that will depend on Zurich’s employees acquiring new skills and embracing new processes and technologies. Which brings us to upskilling. 

Upskill.

You may have a unicorn in your backyard without even knowing it.

What can distract you from that realization? Budget. If it prevents you from hiring, then you may next consider whether you have the funds, and the bandwidth, to pursue training your soon-to-be product owner.

Investing in your training muscle—developing a training capability, establishing career coaching, and encouraging growth from within in other forms and fashions—could do more than just produce the perfect product owner. It will signal to your employees that you want them to stay, that their contributions matter, and that there is space for them to grow internally. Retention could soar, innovation may spike, and revenue would, inevitably, grow.

If training isn’t on the agenda, you may decide to pursue upskilling simply because your employees hold something valuable already: their relationships and their institutional knowledge. The high-performing product owner will have already built relationships with their colleagues, will know the dynamics that exist between teams, will understand the technologies used, and will be better equipped to align IT and business stakeholders. Most importantly, they will have established trust.

Perhaps not even trust is the most important thing. What could be? Institutional knowledge, which, as we’ve seen, an existing employee will already have. They will know the tools, know the processes (which they’ve seen are convoluted at times), and know the customers of the company they are serving (and can speak to the company’s competitive differentiation, not just industry norms). Best of all, they know the product—its thorns, buds, and roses.

Find your unicorn sooner rather than later

Believing in the value of the product operating model is one thing. It’s another to embrace the transformation from project to product with eyes wide open. You should acknowledge the challenges you will encounter, most notably that this one role could make or break the transformation. So before you’re too far into the journey, remind yourself: if you don’t know who your product owner is, at least understand what will dictate whether you hire, contract, or upskill. Better to figure it out now, not later.