I am a Lead Developer for a startup company and in the last couple of months some of the Product Owners (PO) have talked to members of my team about changes in the software development process and about changes to implementation details.
For example one PO asked to change our branching strategy to GitFlow instead of the Workflow set by me and the Head of Development and another PO asked to change the Database schema.
The POs are specifically for different teams and even if they where for my team, I feel like these specific things are outside of the POs responsibility.
They talk to my team when I am not there, which feels a little like they try to go behind my back. Especially since these where always things I am opposed to.
I usually learn about these things Hours or days later randomly from my Team, but I only get incomplete and second hand information about the situation.
My questions specifically are:
- How can I approach this Topic with the POs and try to get them to include me in the discussions when they have these requests?
- How can I approach this with my team and try to get them to not simply follow the PO requests without consulting me first?