Be the Chaos Monkey your Product Backlog needs
“Could you add this to the backlog?” John Ira, CEO of Magnum Opus (J. Ira for short) asked the team responsible for creating the Handpalm Geometry Scanner.
“We could, sir. Technically, you could even add it yourself. But there already are 500 other items in there that our other stakeholders requested us to do. There’s only so much time we have, yet an almost unlimited pool of requests. We don't know where to start anymore.”
The team was overwhelmed just looking at their backlog. They’ve been so successful in creating amazing products before, that everyone now wants them to build something for them too. They were, as famous 21st-century philosopher DJ Khaled said, “suffering from success”.
Now what were they supposed to do? It’s time for the Product Owner to become the Chaos Monkey this team’s Product Backlog needs.
What does this PBI do?
Chaos Monkey is a tool created by Netflix. It is, as it reads on their website:
Chaos Monkey is responsible for randomly terminating instances in production to ensure that engineers implement their services to be resilient to instance failures.
Now imagine that Roy Mifflin, the Product Owner of this team, would become his very own version of Chaos Monkey. 500…
