While your bicycle tangent is valuable, your initial criticism of the cartoon missed a very important point — the premise of the cartoon is the product owner does not ask for “a car”, he asks for “a way to get from A to B”. This is why delivering a skateboard in sprint zero is acceptable.

This conflation of “what” and “how”, most prevalent with technical product owners given some authority to mandate the “how”, has been a recurring thorn in my side.