The Princess Product Owner
Are you about to play the role of Product Owner? Here is a simple fairy tale that will lead you discovering some tips and tricks of this fundamental role
This article was written together with Alessandro Banzatti.
The need of a simple fairy tale in our Product Owners’ training courses
As a company running an Agile projects, we often encounter the need of training colleagues in their new Scrum roles. During trainings, the need of spreading agile values and principles in a simple but effective way grows more and more every day.
An inspiration to satisfy this need came from the story “The Origin of Shoes: a Tale” excerpted from the book “Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The version we developed, that we are going to tell in this article, represents our free Agile interpretation of it and we called it “The Princess Product Owner Tale”.
We have experienced that “The Princess Product Owner Tale” allowed our Product Owners to reflect on team dynamics from an external point of view, instead of from their own position and it is an easy way to fix in their memory Scrum roles, as long as Agile values and principles.
A brief review of Scrum framework roles
There are 3 key roles in the Scrum framework:
- The Scrum Master from which the framework takes its name, them is the person who sets the work approach and supports the growth of the team, responsible for work methodology and team performance
- The development team, a self-organized team with all the skills necessary to create the product, responsible for the development of the product with the best technology and the highest quality
- The Product Owner who knows the needs and keeps in mind the vision of the future, they are responsible for explaining the needs to the team and accountable for maximizing the value
Lastly, we have one or more stakeholders who sponsor the project.
The Product Owner is one of the most complex roles to play in the team, both for those who come from a humanistic and technical background. For this reason, during the Agile training of our Product Owners, we analyze together all the group dynamics that may occur, and we compare them on specific situations, and from these sharing, the following fairy tale was born.
Our fairy tale
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, it is told there was a kingdom with a King and his daughter, the Princess. The Princess loved walking around the kingdom. But one day during a walk, she injured her foot by accidentally hitting a stone in a street. She loved profoundly her people and she thought kingdom roads’ conditions were terrible for everyone.
Therefore, she went to the Prime Minister and asked him to cover all the streets with leather, so that no one would ever have to suffer from stubbing a toe again. The Prime Minister was about the feasibility and the cost, so he asked for extra time to talk with the other Ministers.
The next day the Prime Minister returned to the Princess: “Your Highness, we have it! Instead of covering the whole kingdom in leather, why don’t we craft pieces of leather shaped to your feet and attach them in some suitable way? Then, wherever you go, your feet will have protection with the ground, and we will not have to incur such a large expense and forgo the sweetness of the earth.”.
The Princess was well pleased with this suggestion, so shoes came into the world.
Let’s wrap-up who is who
Within the story it is easy to identify who the stakeholder was, who would have sponsored the project. This is the first character to appear in history, the King. He had a copious budget and would have done anything to please his beloved daughter but in reality — like all stakeholders — he didn’t have infinite resources.
Thanks to a brainstorming, the team of Ministers manages to identify a truly innovative solution with a very high value-cost ratio, they fully represent the agile team that takes the risks of making a completely different proposal to solve the need.
Finally, who is the Product Owner in the story? Who is able to identify the need? The Princess who, like our Product Owners (ex: our production engineers), lives in the field and is able to identify the real needs of the users. She also has a strong vision, ‘all citizens of the kingdom should be safe from injury’.
What can we learn from this fairy tale?
An Agile team works because each role complements the other, the Ministers team, living in the castle, they would never have been able to identify or understand except thanks to the Princess. The Princess did not have the skills to identify the technological solution.
But sometimes those who play the role of Product Owner fall into the trap of proposing solutions.
This pattern is triggered by two factors, the first is the desire to help the team, the second is the feeling of urgency derived from the strong awareness of the need that leads to wanting to speed things up. To avoid this trap, just work on transparent communication and building trust between team members and the Product Owner and on a roadmap with sustainable sprints that do not create load peaks, to guarantee the team the time to conceive a proposal that brings true innovation.
“The Princess Product Owner Tale” emerged as an internal Lesson Learnt during the training courses we deliver, as we were searching for an easy and simple way to. transmit and teach Agile values and principles to our Product Owners. We think this also helps them seeing team dynamics from an external point of view and, since it is a simple fairy tale, it helps having concepts and contents easily fixed in their memory.
