Reflection on Resolving Conflicts with The Product Owner By Writing
Enhancing Team Collaboration and Personal Insight
Outline
· A Hostile Conversation with The Product Owner
· Writing with Satir Model
· What I Aware From The Process
· Improvement Actions
· Coach’s Murmur
· Let Me Help You
A Hostile Conversation with The Product Owner
Several days ago, I had an aggressive conversation with the product owner because he was pretty self-centered and ignored our comments on improving the process of backlog management. As a scrum master, I took the duty to collect developers’ feedback and had a meeting with him.
- Prepare backlogs up front before the sprint plannings.
- Don’t create tickets right at the planning session and ask members for acceptance criteria.
- Support documents, like wireframes, should not be ambiguous, which creates unnecessary imagination room for developers.
- Tickets need to be created according to the provided template.
- Reserve time for fixing bugs from previous sprint.
As I touched these points, he started debating with me. For example, what we view as wireframes are designs from his viewpoint, QA needs to prepare acceptance criteria, developers should engage in brainstorming session, etc. I felt irritated because similar things happened before and our members’ suggestions were not respected. Even, he often interrupted my talks so I couldn’t wait to fight against him.
As a result, the conversation failed as you imagine because both-sides didn’t reserve room listening to each other. And my manager noticed the situation and said the method I addressed the issue was wrong, which made me a little frustrated and took a long time think about what went wrong between us.
Writing with Satir Model
An idea came into my mind that maybe I could dig out some deeper information from writing with Satir Model, which also helped me clarify why I got upset in this conversation. And start thinking about how to relieve the situation and lead the product owner to take improvement actions. I would say, the ultimate root cause would be on me.
In terms of Satir Model, I need to identify 5 layers of my iceberg: behavior, feelings, perceptions, expectations, and yearnings. But this time, I tried to talk to myself by writing all the things happened in my interaction with the product owner, and extract these 5 elements from within it. The story was described as below.
During yesterday’s Daily Scrum and discussions with the developers, some teammates came to me with complaints about the product owner. They mentioned that, during the planning session, the product owner did not clearly explain the sprint goals and expected outcomes. Instead, he was opening tickets on the spot, discussing requirements as he went along, and confirming the acceptance criteria with the team in real time. This made the planning process unnecessarily lengthy and unfocused.
Additionally, the wireframes provided by the product owner were vague (and in some cases, not provided at all), forcing the developers to guess his requirements, resulting in extra time spent on back-and-forth confirmation with him, which occupied their development time.
When my teammates came to me with these complaints yesterday, I felt a lot of pressure, as they genuinely wanted to solve this issue. So, I collected everyone’s feedback to him and then called the product owner. When I mentioned that creating requirements on the spot made it difficult for the team to digest and discuss them, and that the wireframes were too ambiguous, leading to unnecessary guesswork, his tone became agitated, and he questioned the examples I provided.
In response, I entered “debate mode” and bluntly pointed out that his vision and the team’s vision were not aligned. The team often has to spend extra time digesting his ideas, and while they might respond with surface-level phrases like “Yes, I know,” “Okay,” and “No problem,” there’s a high probability they’re actually struggling to adapt to this leadership style, but in vain. Later, I calmed myself down and asked him to have another conversation with the team to hear their feedback directly.
I admit I came across as assertive because I wanted him to hear me out, respect me and the team, and make adjustments to help us stay focused during collaboration. This would make our discussions more efficient and enjoyable.
And I extracted the 5 elements after careful review on the story, from the viewpoints of both the product owner and me.
What I Aware From The Process
After finishing the writing, I had a deep reflection on the conflict. Why did it happen? What kinds of approach I could take? How to get to the core of the argument? And ultimately, WHY ME?
Apparently both sides have different expectations from each other, which resulted in various conflicts between the product owner and the team. Therefore, the first thing is to adapt the expectations to reach a balance. However, a voice came into my mind when I was thinking about it.
Do both sides trust each other?
I’d come across similar product owners before and felt suffered when it comes to talking to them, which was a hard time for me to balance their impact on the collaboration. But this time somewhat I view it as a faith to break the loop because I came to find maybe we both sides were sticking to the SURFACE PATTERN for a long while.
Knock The Inner Iceberg
Yesterday I took some time to work with the teammates writing down all the things we observed during the process, as below. I led them to follow the Satir Model to write down what they immediately came up with.
I was impressed by their opinions because they wrote these genuinely, which means they also wanted to resolve the issue since the product owner already affected many aspects in their daily routines. And finally, I ask them a deeper question.
Do you think we have a good relationship?
Most people said NO. Some issues were pointed out that worsened the relationship, as below.
- Stubborn. Always stick to his own opinions.
- Too busy to focus on the team except his goal.
- Always asking teammates lots of question when preparing documents, which causes lengthy back-and-forth communication and in turn infinite loop.
- Doesn’t listen to us.
If you read here, I guess you already understand why our inner desire was not satisfied and the relationship got worse. In fact, I think it meaningless to debate whether what each side thinks is correct or incorrect. It is repairing the relationship that matters if we’d like to continue on the collaboration. Sticking to surface patterns and requiring anyone to change only leads to resistant emotions.
People are not resistant to change, they are resistant to being changed.
Improvement Actions
After the deep talk with the teammates, I found in the very beginning we were not in the right direction. We always want to change others to meet our expectations, but ignore that we hadn’t built good relationship such that the collaboration got worse.
As I tried to re-look at the problem from a more high-level perspective. Some ideas came into my mind that firstly I need to intrigue the the product owner’s awareness on the relationship issue. And then it gets possible to talk about what kinds of solutions could be taken to relieve the situation, and improve the collaboration conflicts.
Coach’s Murmur
In my opinion, this is a classical case regarding how to resolve conflicts from iceberg theory. To speak it more precisely, I am improving my spirit level to get the overview of the event. I am unsure how much I can do to turn it around, but I would take effort to refine the interaction results.
Maybe you also had similar experience, right? Comment below and share with me.
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