[1 min thought] Product Owner - the root of a healthy process.
More and more I realise how important the relationship with the Product Owner, his understanding of the process and his knowledge about the team are, when working in an Agile team.
I can go far enough to say that without this “connection”, it will be very hard to establish a good and successful process and in actual fact, the flip-side can bring a lot of bad feelings and frustration.
Let’s look what the main responsibility of a PO is and what happens if he doesn’t care.
Crappy backlog
- No value delivery — creating things that potentially doesn’t bring any value; neither technical nor businesses.
- Mess in priorities — potentially bringing a lot of unfinished products/projects. brings a lot of uncertainty about the future.
- Lack of helicopter view — no ability to understand the true purpose. Lack of clear product vision can highly demotivate the Scrum team.
Crappy PBI
- No acceptance criteria — missing quality, lack of consistency, no “sign off” criteria.
- Big or unfeasible tasks — big lead and cycle time, lack of predictability, big variation of delivery time.
- Not being able to estimate — because of above; lack of basic predictability, big risk factor in terms of value delivery.
Crappy events
- Poor / too micromanaged planning session — negative influence on the team.
- No backlog refinement — a dead end for all above
Crappy communication
- Lack of negotiation — lack of flexibility can bring delays in the delivery process, being closed to ideas can cause reduction of creativity and any mutually beneficial solutions (win-win solutions).
- Lack of time — rest of Scrum team are in the “fog”, don’t know what they need to do and at the same time some unknown expectations are set.
- Things are obvious — development team couldn’t have full businesses context, so things which are trivial for PO can be black magic for rest of the scrum team.
and much much more….
So dear team, take your time and meet your product owner — ideally in person. Try to understand his point of view, and talk, talk a lot, because proper discussion can help you go along farther than you might think. And next time when you are going to review some process, start with this side.
PS. Special thx for Neil
