The product owner is the agile term for an excellent product manager. He defines the vision, roadmap, release plan and the features of the product to build. He is in charge of the budget and of a tentative schedule. Regularly he refines the backlog with his development team(s).
Often I encounter a business analyst or a project manager in this role. What shall they learn to become an effective and efficient product owner?
The Product Owner
This definition is the official text of the Scrum guide.
The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. Product Backlog management includes:
- Clearly expressing Product Backlog items;
- Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions;
- Optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs;
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next;
- Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed.
- The Product Owner may do the above work, or have the Development Team do it. However, the Product Owner remains accountable.
For the Product Owner to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. The Product Owner’s decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog. No one can force the Development Team to work from a different set of requirements.
Toolbox
To be a great product owner you shall extend your toolbox
- Have a vision you can tell as an elevator pitch,
- Have a roadmap for the next three years, visible on the wall on the team room,
- Have a release plan for the next nine months, shown in the team room - release plans were the next three years are just lies -,
- Nurture a product backlog with a maximum of fifty items - additional items are waste for lean practitioners -,
- Create a story map to associate releases with features,
- Create a value stream map to optimize flow - stories older than three months are waste, only epics shall be so old -
- Manage a risk list and mitigation measures - update the list each month -,
- Delegate story refinement, usability, user interface definition to the development team,
- Define story acceptance criteria with the development teams - he is adept of specification by example -,
- Practice self awareness and empathy to successfully apply design thinking,
- Think like an entrepreneur to successfully apply lean thinking - this one is a tricky one -.
Product Owners are not Administrators
A product owner envisions an excellent product and describes the road to it. A product owner shall not administrate his development team.
- You shall not be a cog in a company-wide story factory,
- You shall not track the velocity of your team and color in red the sprints when the forecast was not reached,
- You shall not specify through emails, Word documents, or JIRA tickets,
- You shall not attend every meeting with customers,
- You defined a clear goal for each sprint as stated in the Scrum guide,
- You shall optimize the value of each delivered increment,
- You shall provide specification by example for acceptance criteria to empower your team to use ATDD.
See similar blogs hinting the role of Scrum masters in "Scrum Masters are not Administrators", "What does a Scrum Master?" and "What in do NOT need to to in Scrum".
Final Words
Some tips to become the best product owner in the vicinity.
- Trust your development team and your Scrum master,
- Read the blog of Roman Pichler,
- Embrace analog Scrum board,
- Renounce JIRA,
- Train as a product owner and pursue an advanced certification - the basic one or two days training and certification are just an introduction and certainly not the black belt for this activity -.
No comments:
Post a Comment