Team Conflict as Decision-Rights Problems

A developer at a multinational company answers, without ever being told so directly, to two product owners: one holding the corporate mandate from headquarters overseas, the other based in the regional office, closer to the market the code actually ships into. Most weeks the two mandates never collide — their scopes don’t overlap enough to matter. Then one week they do, and the question that reaches the team isn’t really about scope. It’s about loyalty: whose direction do we follow?

I find that framing is the trap. Answering it directly — defer to whoever holds the formal mandate, or defer to whoever the team actually works alongside day to day — treats a structural gap as a question about people. Both defaults solve the wrong problem.

What’s usually missing is a line nobody ever drew between two kinds of ownership. Cross-market prioritisation, budget, and roadmap sequencing genuinely need someone with a view across the whole company — a case for a mandate held centrally. Shaping a story for what the local market actually needs, sequencing the week’s work, reading context that only comes from proximity — a case for local judgement. Both cases are legitimate. Neither product owner is acting in bad faith when they exercise one.

Defaulting to formal authority every time quietly tells the local product owner that their market knowledge doesn’t count when a decision actually matters, undermining the entire reason a local role exists in the first place. Lean the other way instead, and whatever governance the company believed it had erodes, storing up resentment that tends to resurface later, somewhere that looks unrelated.

Inside the team, this rarely announces itself as a governance question. It shows up as a story replanned twice, a scope decision revisited a third time, a retro item about unclear priorities that keeps coming back no matter how well it’s facilitated. Filed as a communication problem, it doesn’t resolve, because communication was never the gap. Ownership was.

The fix isn’t a company-wide chart handed down from head office — that tends to arrive too rigid to survive contact with a real market. It’s narrower: naming, for the handful of decision categories that actually generate friction, which product owner has final say, and what happens on the rare call that doesn’t fit either category cleanly. An unnamed decision doesn’t stay neutral. Someone makes it anyway, and whoever wasn’t consulted experiences that as being overruled by a colleague, rather than as a structural gap nobody had closed.

Once that line exists, the two product owners can still disagree — that was never really the problem. What changes is what the disagreement means to the people caught in the middle. It stops reading as a test of loyalty and starts reading as exactly what it is: two legitimate views on a call that now, visibly, belongs to one of them.

The leverage point is different for every team. Finding it is the work.