I am a Developer, not a coder.

I don’t want to execute orders. I want to make an impact with my work.

I don’t care and don’t think about methodologies much as long as they let me do my work well.Joshua Kerievsky once said in his article “Customer obsessed teams don’t have product owners”: The choice of what to build or fix is hard. It requires the insights of many to do it well. If you want to do it poorly, delegate all of this work to a single Product Owner (PO).

Installing a PO turns a team of intelligent people into “orderneers” — engineers who take orders.Mary Poppendieck, author of many outstanding books on Lean Software Development, said, “Delegating decisions about what to build to a single Product Owner is outsourcing the most important work of the development team to a person who is unlikely to have the skills or knowledge to make really good decisions.”But still most of the teams do have a product owner. They do outsource most important work to “people who know better” and don’t trust themselves to make right decisions.In this talk, I want to tell a story about one team which decided to try a short 3 month experiment in which product owner role was removed.

I want to tell what we learned in 3 months, in 1 year and what we are learning constantly from this ongoing experiment. A bit of context: this team does not work alone but is a part of a big project at F-Secure. The project is creating an Antivirus for multiple platforms. It has several different backends, portals and tens of teams contributing from across the globe (at least 3 major sites).