Tragedy of the commons

 As a product owner even with the most success in creating autonomy and a good environment to work with your closest peers it is highly likely that you will at some point in time be dependent on others in ways that are not beneficial.

A common generalization for this is called the problem of "tragedy of the commons" which is simply when individuals act in a way that is optimal for them in the short term but eventually leads to a bad situation for the group in the end. Someone polluting the environment for short term financial gain is a good example. A team that adds weight to the car you are all building when you are trying to make it lighter, or a team adding features to a website making it slower when you are trying to make it load faster are examples that you might be more closely related to product development.

There are multiple ways to address the tragedy of the commons, but I'd like to start out by pointing out that if you identify an example within your product you are likely facing a tough problem because the assumption of all acting together for the best possible product is already broken. You are likely to find that actors within the organisation are all combinations of:

• Not understanding
• Not sharing your goals
• Not caring about the customer
• Not intending to be around when the long term effects are clear

Why is this so hard?

Simply because when looking at all the decisions needed to govern the asset, in the long run everybody is likely to at some point be denied the possibility to use it as wished. This creates a situation where there is very little good feedback of how well the asset is managed, which further reduce the willingness to be frugal and/or support the polices for managing the asset.

What are possible solutions then?

Centralized control of the asset is highly successful of the responsible organization can be given suitable tools for enforcement. But if there is dependency to individual actors good behavior you are less likely to succeed.

Social schemes can be highly successful in certain environments, if you have a strong culture of good behavior that perhaps is even coupled to power within the organisation it can be a strong enough stigma to face the risk of being publicly shamed withing the organisation for not acting properly.

Groups or committees put together to control the asset can be efficient if each stakeholder feels that they are well represented and get good feedback if a request to use the asset is denied. A key importance is that the committee is given senior enough support within the organization.

Increasing the individual penalty of using the asset to make sure the cost reflects the total long term cost of reducing the asset can be highly effective. Creating the feedback for this to happen can be very difficult though and might lead to sub optimization and in worst case overly rewarding previous offenders for sizable improvements (which however does leads to the goal).