Sep 13, 2019
This week, on the
Agile Coaches’
Corner, your host Dan
Neumann and his AgileThought colleague, Sam Falco, will be taking a
look at the Product Owner role in Scrum! The Product Owner Role
sometimes gets overlooked in a lot of discussions around Scrum —
yet, they’re one of the most important, complex, and crucial roles.
They’re the visionary behind the product. Primarily, their
responsibility to the Scrum team is to maximize the value of what
the development team creates.
Tune in to hear Dan and Sam’s
conversation to get more insight into the incredibly important
Product Owner role — what it is, the challenges of being one, the
valuable traits and skills for a PO to have, and some of the
anti-patterns around the role!
Key Takeaways
What is the Product Owner Role
in Scrum?
- It is one of the three roles of
Scrum (product owner, scrum master, and the development
team)
- They’re the visionary behind
the product
- They’re a crucial reason to why
we have Scrum teams in the first place — they’re feeding the Scrum
team the most valuable backlog items to turn into an increment of
product every sprint
- The primary role of the Product
Owner is to maximize the value of what the development team
creates
- It’s important that it’s only
one person; not a committee
Challenges of the Product Owner
Role:
- Managing and representing the
opinions and voices of the dev team and stakeholders by distilling
them into a coherent product backlog that’s optimized for
value
Valuable traits for a Product
Owner:
- Someone with a distinct
understanding of the market and a vision for a product that they
want to bring into the world
- An entrepreneurial
mindset
- Someone with very deep domain
knowledge and business knowledge
- Understands the customers (or
potential customers)
- Decisiveness
- Open-mindedness
- Strong leadership skills and
the ability to motivate others
Important skills for a Product
Owner to have:
- Domain and business
knowledge
- The ability to write a good
business proposal as well as a strong canvas that articulates to
funders what it is you’re trying to accomplish
- A willingness to test your
hypothesis and do market research
- Communication skills and
articulating things in a way that makes sense to your development
team
- Negotiation skills
- Having a well-crafted and
well-ordered backlog
- Being able to define the sprint
goal
- Being able to communicate the
vision and having the organizational skills to put the backlog in a
good order so the dev team, customers, and stakeholders always know
what’s next
- Technical skills (though it is
not a must-have, it is helpful for them to have an understanding of
the technology they’re working with) — but be careful, a PO with
technical chops can sometimes interfere with the dev
team
Anti-patterns within
organizations that are not setting up their Product Owner for
success:
- Having someone without the
right traits and skills in the Product Owner role
- Having a proxy PO stand-in for
the real Product Owner, which jumbles the message and leads to
“answer shopping”
- Having the role split into two
people (where one becomes the ‘business’ PO owner and the other
person becomes the ‘technical’ PO), which affects team
self-organization and leads to uncertainty
Product Owner
anti-patterns:
- Rigidity
- Disregarding
estimates
- Product Owner is an
‘order-taker’; simply taking notes and doing everything that is
said (which causes issues because they cannot articulate a clear
vision)
- When a Product Owner is not
valuing everyone’s opinions equally (and instead, giving more value
to those who are loudest or had the last say)
- Presenting a release plan to
stakeholders that is wildly at odds with what the dev team can
accomplish and expecting the dev team to live up to
that
- Unbalanced focus and either
being too involved with the dev team or not enough
- Spending too much time with the
stakeholders
- Only showing up for sprint
reviews
Mentioned in this Episode:
Scrivener
User Stories
The Professional Product Owner:
Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage,
by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham
Thinking in Bets: Making
Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts,
by Annie Duke
Sam Falco’s Book Pick:
Business Model Generation: A
Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and
Challengers, by
Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
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