Are you building product for the customer or the PO ?

One of the biggest challenges facing the Scrum community is understanding the role of Product Owner(PO).

Most of the Scrum teams believe that  PO is a mediator between the customer and the teams. That is, there is a strong belief that PO gathers requirements and passes it to the team. This way of working is the most ineffective way of doing software development. Any hand-off creates wastes and also, PO would end up becoming a bottleneck.

Instead, the most effective way would be for the PO to facilitate the conversation between customers and the teams as much as possible.The direct conversation is not only effective but reduces ambiguity,delay and avoids wastes.

Yes, I understand organizations say it is difficult to get customers on board and spend effort, time, money to engage teams. I guess this is where the organizations need to make a call, whether they want to build great products for the customers or the product owner !!