Balancing product ownership in agile delivery : a mixed-methods study in a sport technology context
Patmore, Alistair (2025)
2025
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025120231756
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025120231756
Tiivistelmä
In Agile organisations, the Product Owner (PO) is positioned as the primary driver of value delivery; however, in real delivery contexts the role often absorbs operational and coordination burdens that shift focus away from strategic work. This thesis examines how this role expansion manifests in a multi-client sport technology company, and how empirical evidence can be used to rebalance PO workload toward value-creating activities. A mixed-methods design was applied: a systematic literature review to establish the conceptual foundation, twelve semi-structured interviews to capture lived experience and perceived pain points, and quantitative workload analysis of time-tracking data from May–July 2025 to measure actual effort distribution across task categories.
The findings show that the majority of PO effort is consumed by testing, operational support, and unplanned incident handling, while strategic planning is consistently displaced by context switching, coordination dependencies, and unclear business direction. Interviews highlighted role strain emerging through ambiguity, overlap with other roles, delivery responsibilities, and reactive stakeholder communication. In parallel, recurring lean wastes - such as rework from absent test plans, waiting due to cross-team dependencies, and bespoke non-scalable client requests - compound time loss and reduce the space for proactive roadmap work. Crucially, the convergence of qualitative and quantitative evidence provides the conditions for organisational change: instead of attributing overload to individual capacity or skill, the results make visible the structural sources of imbalance.
Based on these insights, this thesis proposes the Balanced Product Ownership Framework (BPOF), which offers (1) target time ratios to rebalance effort toward value-creating tasks, (2) clarified role boundaries and RACI guidance, (3) lightweight intake and coordination mechanisms to reduce reactive load, and (4) an implementation roadmap with metrics for governance. The study contributes theoretically by extending understanding of product ownership under high relational and operational demand through role theory, and relational coordination lenses, and contributes practically by delivering an actionable framework for enabling sustainable PO practice in Agile delivery environments.
The findings show that the majority of PO effort is consumed by testing, operational support, and unplanned incident handling, while strategic planning is consistently displaced by context switching, coordination dependencies, and unclear business direction. Interviews highlighted role strain emerging through ambiguity, overlap with other roles, delivery responsibilities, and reactive stakeholder communication. In parallel, recurring lean wastes - such as rework from absent test plans, waiting due to cross-team dependencies, and bespoke non-scalable client requests - compound time loss and reduce the space for proactive roadmap work. Crucially, the convergence of qualitative and quantitative evidence provides the conditions for organisational change: instead of attributing overload to individual capacity or skill, the results make visible the structural sources of imbalance.
Based on these insights, this thesis proposes the Balanced Product Ownership Framework (BPOF), which offers (1) target time ratios to rebalance effort toward value-creating tasks, (2) clarified role boundaries and RACI guidance, (3) lightweight intake and coordination mechanisms to reduce reactive load, and (4) an implementation roadmap with metrics for governance. The study contributes theoretically by extending understanding of product ownership under high relational and operational demand through role theory, and relational coordination lenses, and contributes practically by delivering an actionable framework for enabling sustainable PO practice in Agile delivery environments.