I am sitting in in a café in Singapore enjoying a
well-deserved drink and dinner after teaching day 1 of the Scrum.org
Professional Scrum Product Owner course.
We have students from Indonesia, Singapore and Cambodia on
the course. We have spent much of the
first day chasing the idea of value in product development. Where does the value reside in our product
backlog. How do we identify it,
prioritise it and maximise it.
Identifying value is hard. Is it
our value, our customers value or both?
Is it profit generated, satisfaction earned or costs saved? These are some of the many challenges of
Product Ownership today.
We ask a lot of our Product Owners. We ask that they be entrepreneurs, experimenters,
and like product explorers. We ask that
they provide a clear compelling vision to our teams and are able to accurately
represent many conflicting stakeholders.
This is hard. Are we
asking too much? Can you really bring a start
up mind set to a bank or an insurance company?
Can a validated learning approach really exist in corporate IT? Are they able to actually interpret and
respond to Scrum’s feedback loops?
Many companies ‘assign’ product owners from the ‘business’
(don’t you love that word.) If you talk
about anyone outside of IT as ‘the business’ then I worry for you. If you see them the business, what do they
see you as? Probably a monopoly provider
of questionable service. What do you think
would happen if ‘the business’ could choose a different service provider? Would they still choose you? If they didn’t could you attract new clients?
I thought not. You care about the success of the organisation. So do they.
You are on the same team. You are
not ‘trusted partners of the business’, you are the business.
An assigned Product Owner who already has a full time job will
not work – yes I did say that. Let’s
turn this round. Are you a full time
developer / tester / ba / other – great.
Let’s pretend we have an exciting new project and it’s so important that
it gets funded. We show how important it
is by having you be the Product Owner.
As well as your day job of course.
What could possibly go wrong?
These are often multi-million dollar programs / projects. I don’t want to devalue your day job, but
really?
We ask a lot of our Product Owners. Maybe too much. But don’t make it impossible.
nice blog..The Scrum product owner is a project's key stakeholder. The individual is responsible for the success of the product of a company, and he may lead a team under his guidance and leadership. So cspo training is very essential to become a scrum product owner.
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