Killing thy Product Owner
This topic is not meant to demean the profession of Product Ownership and doesn't mean that the Product Owner is not essential so killing them would solve the problem; rather it highlights the amount of dependencies a development team may end up building around the Product Owner that may end up killing the credibility and value chain driven by product ownership.
Keeping aside the fact that organisations today recruit Scrum Masters and Product Owners as designations instead of scrum roles, the role of product ownership has been misunderstood as a one person job, which kills the entire purpose of being a Product Owner - voice of the customer to maximise ROI. PO doesn't own the product alone and definitely doesn't own the implementation details. Enough said, this scrum role needs a deeper understanding. Then again, who performs this role in XP or Kanban or SAFe or a no framework setup?
In this session, I execute 3 iterations to highlight the team's dysfunctions, and apply practices a team can perform so a Product Owner can function much better and improve the credibility of this role. It's pretty quick and enlightenting; all hands-on, no PPT.
Outline/Structure of the Demonstration
- Begin with the honey bee analogy to understand the role of a software developer
- Divide in small teams
- Iteration 1: Ask the team to write a story as they would expect from a PO
- Highlight dysfunction with the level of details expected
- Fix the dysfunction
- Iteration 2: Ask the team to jot down questions for the PO related to the written story
- Highlight the dysfunction with restriction to one person innovation
- Fix the dysfunction
- Iteration 3: Ask the team to list dependencies because of PO
- Highlight bottlenecks that can be solved without PO intervention
- Fix the dysfunction
Learning Outcome
Highlight the following team dysfunctions:
- Killing creativity by expecting minute details from the PO
- Killing innovation by restricting it to just a single person (the PO)
- Killing productivity by creating a bottleneck that is the PO
- Killing customer focus by not facing the customer
- (and finally) Killing the product by not taking ownership
Target Audience
Team / individual working with product owner / manager
Prerequisites for Attendees
- Basic experience interacting with product owners / managers or similar
- Have a set of expectations from product owners / managers or similar
Video
schedule Submitted 5 years ago
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