founding the product owner discipline
One agency-side PO role, designed into a governed team of six.
I was the first agency-side product owner at Team One. The job after the job was building the discipline itself: prioritization standards, roadmap governance, decision-lane clarity, and training structures for incoming mid-level POs — scaled from one role into a team of six, with product vision spanning a 98-person digital organization across eight teams.
Org design responds to the same instincts as system design. Define the interfaces, make ownership explicit, and the structure outlasts you.
The 2026 chapter: account and product ownership merged into one Product Lead per scrum team — the lead owns the what and why, the producer owns the when and how. My part was the methodology and the tools: a coverage model (monitor, execute, escalate, with a handoff protocol for time off), a training plan with a “websites 101” primer, a sprint-by-sprint ramp from training to supervised to full ownership, and a publisher that pushes the repo's markdown to the wiki so the source of truth stays in version control.
Full case study in progress — artifacts pending clearance or writing time. The insight below is already earned.
A discipline is a designed system — governance, guardrails, ownership lanes — applied to people instead of code.
the insightpart of the practice — product ownership at platform scale.