It was interesting reading Mike Cohn’s blog entry on The Falacy of One Throat to Choke. I remember this very phrase being used during my ScrumMaster training, saying that the Product Owner was the “one throat to choke”.
Mike is right, of course. It is called a Scrum team for a reason. The team will work together in order to achieve success. If the Product Owner has not been able to gather enough information to be confident of the direction to move forward, the team won’t sit around watching youtube until they do. The team will ask the product owner what they DO know, and will exert their efforts in ways that will help the Product Owner. For example, they may build prototypes that the PO can take to the users, to facilitate more constructive conversations.
One might argue that if the team builds the wrong thing, it is on the head of the product owner. But the team is full of living, breathing, thinking human beings. The developers are not mindless automatons serving the whims of the product owner. Everyone should have the mindset of serving the needs of the customer. If team members think that perhaps the product is going in the wrong direction, they have a responsibility to communicate that. If they do not, their neck deserves to get choked as much as the PO. Now, if you have a product owner who doesn’t take feedback, then by all means, you have your single throat to choke.
One argument leveled against Agile is that it can be used as an excuse for not delivering, citing the need for ‘direction.’ This, of course, is a Waterfall mentality trying to do iterative development, and not Agile. The team that takes responsibility for their success will never have that argument used against them.