The Product Owner Bottleneck – Why One Person Can’t Do It All
The Product Owner bottleneck isn’t just frustrating, but it is costing teams 40% more delays and 28% lower velocity, according to recent research.
I’ll never forget the Monday morning our entire digital services project came to a halt.
Our Product Owner was sick. Nothing serious. Just a bad cold. She’d be back in three days.
But the team was paralyzed.
This is the third post in our Agile Transformation series. If you missed them, you can read the first post here: Why 84% of Companies Are Still Faking Agile (And What Actually Works). And the second post here: Making Agile Work When You Run Distributed Agile Team Members
A developer had questions about a user story. Couldn’t move forward. A tester needed clarification on acceptance criteria. Stuck. The stakeholder from the finance department wanted to change a priority. No one could make that call.
Three days. Twelve people are sitting around. Waiting for one person to come back.
I did the math later. That one person being unavailable for three days cost us roughly $18,000 in wasted time. For a cold.
That’s when I realized we had built a massive single point of failure into our Agile process. And we weren’t alone.
The One-Person Problem
According to the 2024 Scrum Alliance State of Scrum report, 67% of Scrum teams identify “Product Owner availability” as their top impediment to velocity. Not technical problems. Not tools. Not even organizational bureaucracy. The Product Owner.
Here’s what’s happening. We take one person and make them responsible for everything:
- They write all the user stories.
- They prioritize the entire backlog.
- They attend every stakeholder meeting.
- They answer every team question.
- They make every product decision.
- They review every sprint deliverable.
- They handle every customer request.
It’s impossible. No human can do all of that well. But we keep expecting them to.
The result? The Product Owner becomes a bottleneck. Work piles up waiting for their input. Teams sit idle waiting for decisions. Quality suffers because they’re rushing through story reviews. Strategic thinking disappears because they’re buried in tactical details.
And God forbid they get sick, take a vacation, or have a family emergency. Everything stops.
Research from Mountain Goat Software found that teams with overloaded Product Owners experience 40% more delays and 28% lower velocity compared to teams with well-supported POs. That’s huge.
Why Government Makes This Worse
In government, this problem is even more brutal. I’ve lived it.
Government Product Owners don’t just serve one stakeholder. They serve multiple agencies or projects. Each with their own priorities. Each with their own political pressures. Each demanding immediate attention.
It could be one that’s juggling requests from:
- The Ministry of Finance
- Internal audit
- The IT security team
- Compliance officers
- Three different department directors
- The actual development team
And if you’re spending 6 hours a day in meetings, that leaves maybe 2 hours for actual product work: writing stories, refining the backlog, and thinking strategically.
If this is your reality, you’re drowning. And because government moves slowly on hiring, you can’t just “get help.” By the time you post the job, interview candidates, and onboard someone, six months have passed.
The result? You can expect the team’s velocity to drop by 35% in three months. Not because the developers are slow, but because they are constantly waiting. Waiting for decisions. Waiting for clarifications. Waiting for priorities.
One developer told me, “I feel like I’m asking permission to do my job.”
The Real Solution is to Stop Depending on One Person
You can’t solve this by finding a better Product Owner. Or by telling your current PO to “manage their time better.” The role as designed is broken.
The solution is to stop treating the Product Owner like a single point of control and start building a system where the team shares ownership.
I know what you’re thinking. “But the Product Owner is supposed to be the single voice of the customer!”
Yes. But single voice doesn’t mean single person doing everything. It means clear accountability for decisions, supported by a team that can handle the work.
Here’s how to actually fix this (Product Owner bottleneck):
Step 1: Define What Needs a Decision vs. What Doesn’t
Most things teams wait for the PO to decide don’t actually need the PO.
Create a “Definition of Ready” for user stories. These are the criteria a story must meet before the team can work on it. Once the team knows these criteria, they can prepare stories themselves. The PO just reviews and approves.
In our agency, we defined eight clear criteria. Things like “Acceptance criteria are testable” and “Dependencies are identified.” Team members started writing stories. The PO’s job became reviewing them, not creating them from scratch. Her workload dropped by 40%.
Step 2: Build Team Capability Through Collaboration
Stop having the PO refine the backlog alone. Make it a team activity.
We started holding weekly “refinement workshops.” The whole team attended. Developers, testers, even our business analyst. We’d take upcoming work and break it down together. The PO guided the process, but everyone contributed.
What happened? The team understood the work better. They caught problems earlier. And when the PO was unavailable, the team could keep moving because they understood the product vision.
A study by Scrum.org found that teams practicing collaborative refinement report 31% fewer delays and 23% higher sprint completion rates.
Step 3: Create Clear Escalation Paths
Not every decision needs the Product Owner. But the team needs to know which ones do.
We created a simple framework:
- Low-impact decisions (like technical implementation choices): The team decides.
- Medium-impact decisions (like minor scope adjustments within a story): The lead developer or senior team member decides, then informs the PO.
- High-impact decisions (like changing priorities or cutting features): Only the PO decides.
This framework did something magical. It freed the PO from dozens of small decisions every day. And it empowered the team to keep moving.
Step 4: Delegate Stakeholder Management
In government, this was the game-changer.
Our PO couldn’t possibly attend every stakeholder meeting. So we trained three team members on stakeholder communication. They attended meetings. They gathered requirements. They brought information back to the team.
The PO still made final decisions on priorities. But she wasn’t spending 6 hours a day in meetings anymore. She could actually do product work.
One warning: this only works if you clearly communicate roles. Stakeholders need to understand that the team members are gathering information, not making commitments. That clarity is critical.
Step 5: Document Everything
This sounds boring. But it saves you.
When the PO is unavailable, the team needs to know what she was thinking. Why did we prioritize this feature? What problem are we solving? What does success look like?
We started requiring product context on every user story. Not just “As a user, I want X.” But “We’re building this because our citizens are currently spending 45 minutes on this process, and we need to reduce it to 10 minutes.”
That context meant the team could make smart decisions even when the PO wasn’t available. They understood the “why,” not just the “what.”
What This Actually Looks Like
After we implemented these changes, something amazing happened.
Our Product Owner took a two-week vacation. First time in three years.
The team kept working. They refined stories. They made decisions. They talked to stakeholders. Velocity didn’t drop. Quality didn’t suffer.
When she came back, she said: “I checked Slack a few times, and you all had everything handled. I actually relaxed.”
That’s the goal. Not to eliminate the Product Owner role. But to eliminate the single point of failure.
The PO should be guiding the ship, not rowing it alone.
The Bottom Line – What is The Product Owner Bottleneck?
One person can’t do it all. They shouldn’t have to.
When you build a system where the team shares ownership, you get faster decisions, better quality, and happier Product Owners. You stop losing thousands of dollars every time someone gets a cold.
In government especially, where bureaucracy already slows everything down, you can’t afford another bottleneck. Delegate. Collaborate. Empower.
Your Product Owner will thank you. Your team will thank you. And your velocity will prove it was worth it.
But here’s the thing: even if you solve the Product Owner bottleneck, there’s another problem lurking. A silent killer that most teams ignore until it’s too late.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about technical debt. That accumulating pile of shortcuts, workarounds, and “we’ll fix it later” decisions that eventually destroys your ability to deliver anything at all. And more importantly, how to pay it down without stopping delivery.
