The product owner who didn’t deliver

The product owner had been on the project for over a year without delivering any software.

That was the position I walked into when hired as the business analyst for a digital banking project.

An amount of documentation and screen designs had been produced, not perfect, but certainly enough to build something.

The product owner was friendly and clever enough that the complete lack of progress made no sense at all.

I became very interested in finding out the back story of why so little had been done, and equally started to suspect something had gone very, very wrong.

It turned out the project was never funded properly by the business and the product owner had informally agreed with a software vendor to build his designs ‘very cheaply’.

The vendor had actually gone one step further by productising the designs and was selling the functionality to his competitors. Worse still, it had been built in a way that didn’t suit the product owner’s own business!

I took swift, drastic action to address the situation before successfully commencing the work of building their new banking platform.

A cautionary tale of not having the right expertise on your team and trying to stretch too far beyond your budget.