Product Owner role confusion in construction

Agile in Construction: The Product Owner Role in Construction—Voice of the Customer Across Every Phase With Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

In this episode, we refer to Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, as well as our Agile in Construction episodes.

The Great Product Owner: Bringing the Voice of the Customer to Every Decision

"I want you to think like the owner, and bring that to the team meetings, because we can't have the owner in the meetings with us." - Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

The Product Owner role in construction is radically different from software—and Felipe has learned to find it in unexpected places. When Jeff Sutherland told his class to "tear up your business cards" because only three roles exist (Developer, Scrum Master, Product Owner), construction people were confused. Felipe's approach: ask the team who can bring the voice of the customer. Sometimes it's the superintendent, interfacing daily with charge nurses and doctors in a working hospital. Sometimes it's a project executive. Rarely, it's the project manager. The key is that the PO role changes across phases because every day in construction is brand new—the building is physically taking shape. Felipe studied military leadership in Extreme Ownership and Team of Teams and found strong product owner culture—leaders who brought customer voice to cell-level teams against hierarchical norms. Great product owners speak in terms of what the customer wants, transforming how teams prioritize and align naturally.

Self-reflection Question: Who on your team currently embodies the voice of the customer, and how might you coach them to bring that perspective more explicitly to every team interaction?

The Bad Product Owner: When Gut Decisions Override Value

"Value is a beneficial transformation of materials, information, or a combination of both. Let's not do things that don't transform information or materials." - Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe shares a powerful anti-pattern: owners who make gut decisions based on past project trauma without checking if conditions are still true. On a $100 million project, an owner repeatedly introduces work that doesn't add value—reacting to bad things that happened on previous projects, even when those conditions no longer exist. The result? Teams waste time on activities that don't transform materials or information. Felipe teaches teams an industrial engineering definition of value: "a beneficial transformation of materials, information, or a combination of both." Status updates that don't change behavior are waste. Markings on metal decking that will be buried under 5 inches of concrete are waste. The fix? Make the backlog visible and ask: "Where should we zipper this in so it has the most impact on transforming materials or information?" For construction, prioritization always comes back to getting the right materials in place, one time, at the right time—not touching things twice.

Self-reflection Question: When stakeholders introduce work based on past experiences, how do you help them evaluate whether those conditions still apply to the current situation?

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About Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide—and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.

You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.

You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.