[Fit for Scrum] - Roles of Scrum Team - Product Owner

[viphat]

A Scrum Product Owner (PO) is responsible for maximizing the value of the product from work of the Development Team.

The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog.

• 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 shoes what the Scrum Team will work on next, and,
• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed.

Who want to change a Product Backlog item's priority must address the Product Owner.

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.

Some responsibilities of Product Owner:

• Build the right things.
• He is the driver of the Product.
• He will share the vision.
• He is responsible for the success of the product.
• He is committed to the Product.
• He will continuously work with Dev Team & Stakeholder.
• He will work with all Stakeholders together.
• He need to take care and write down what they want to understand what they need.
• He will work on the release date and content (with Team input of the estimation).
• He will keep the Team up to date about the knowledge of users and market needs.
• He analyze the Customer needs.
• Creates and Maintains Product Backlog (Keep it up to date, prioritize the backlog based on customer benefit/value/urgency)
• Participates Planning meetings, Review, Retrospective and may also join the Daily Meeting.
• He will accept the final work results (delivered product, e.g. in Review Meeting).
• Single Responsibility to the Product.
• Responsible for the Product and the ROI.
• Represents the Stakeholders and the business (transfer the Vision).
• Work daily with the Development Team (Join Planning & Review & Retrospective).

Some pitfalls:

• PO is overloaded
• PO is not authorized will also slow down the process.
• PO is not authorized will also make the planning inefficient.
• PO is not available.
• PO has managed more than one team and can not get a commitment for his Team.
• PO has too many Products to manage.
• PO get no support by management.
• PO forget the incremental development.
• PO forgot/misunderstood the idea of MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Agile Product Ownership in a nutshell

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE&feature=youtu.be

Product Owner has a product vision that he's really passionate about. He doesn't know the details of what his product is going to do but he knows why we're building the product and what problem is gonna solve and for who. (He talks about it all the time)

Stakeholders - They're the people who are going to use and support in any way be affected by the system being developed.

User stories - Stakeholders' needs.

Self-organized, cross-functional Development Team

Capacity + Story point.

Automated testing & continuous integration.

Stakeholders have lots of ideas and lots of wishes and every time we deliver something to them, they'll get even more ideas and ask for even more stuff.

lose-lose proposition. Limit work in progress (Limit WIP) Simultaneously

Prioritize user stories based on value and size is a guessing game.

Communication

Splitting stories and sometimes writing acceptance criteria for a story

Individuals & Interactions over processes and tools >> Communication is the key to success in Product Owner Role of Scrum Team

Risk

• Business
• Social
• Tech
• Cost + Schedule (Can we finish it a reasonable amount of time?)

Knowledge acquisition

Short term vs Long term

Find the balance: Build the right thing, Build the thing right, Build it fast

PO focuses on build the right thing, development team focuses on build the thing right, scrum masters focus on build it fast on shortening the feedback loop. Short feedback loop will accelerate learning so you'll more quickly learn what the right thing is and how to build it right.

Trade-off.

Expectation management Velocity > Burn up chart Fixed Scope or Fixed Time or both.

Burn down chart

Output vs Outcome

On Large teams, we need a Chief Product Owner and each product owner manage smaller teams.

[viphat]

I am not a Project Manager. I am the driver of the project.