Superusers Are Your Startup’s Secret Key to High Growth

What if you brought all that knowledge and motivation in-house?

Twice in the past three months, I’ve recommended bringing on a product owner at two of the high-tech, high-growth startups I work with.

In both cases, the startup’s leadership wasn’t exactly sure what I meant. Don’t get me wrong, these are startups with multimillion-dollar run rates, led by people with decades of experience. So sure, they knew what a product owner was, kind of, they just weren’t crystal clear on what the product owner would do and what benefits they would bring to, you know, the product.

This was fine — better than fine, actually, because I’m using the lowercase “product owner” instead of the uppercase Scrum/Agile-oriented “Product Owner.”

It was also a plus because they didn’t know enough to do it wrong. So I clarified that what they needed was a superuser. And then it all made sense.

The Term ‘Product Owner’ Immediately Takes the Customer Out of the Equation

While I’m a fan of parts of Scrum and some of the benefits of Agile, I put them in the same unholy mess of a bucket with all the PMI/PMP project management tools and methods that are shockingly…