Agile Socal User Group Jan 16, 2013 The Product Owner Role: Have Fun With It!

AgileSocal Meeting Description NOTE: time-limited description

Presenter: [email protected]

What Happened

Mostly exercises in which we "walked in the product owner's shoes" as the meeting description promised. We broke into groups of 5 or 6 (probably close to 50 people attended) and did practice product backlog and sprint planning meetings.

In each exercise, a different person in the group "volunteered" to be the product manager.

Takeaways

Product Owner Qualities and Empowerment

A successful product owner must be endowed with the following:

• Authority
• Knowledge
• Availability

On one of the sessions, the product owners were secretly instructed to "become deficient" in one of the endowments during the meeting; it was interesting to see the extent in which the rest of the team was slowed down.

Differences in Backlog Grooming

The presenter suggested that backlog grooming was done by the entire team:

• Help provide input to the product manager for prioritizing.
• Flesh out incompletely specified cards where possible (add "conditions of satisfaction", etc).

In our organization, the engineering manager and product owner do this function. I think there are pros and cons; my own preliminary judgement is that I think that each team member can independently flesh out information on cards at any time and should be encouraged to do so. So I lean against a meeting for the entire team to do this, but whether either solution is better almost certainly depends upon the team.

Backing Up the Product Owner

I agree with the presenter's assertion that the product owner has the most challenging role on the team. Hence, it is important for the team to support the product owner and for the product owner to "be there" for the team. All product owners miss information that is important to their role; team members should try to supply that information to the product owner when they have it. I.e. the product owner is watching out for the team; the team needs to watch out for the product owner (my words).

How the Product Owner Should Prioritize Stories - One Approach

For some reason I hadn't seen this:

The most happiness is in the top-left happy face: the most bang for the least buck.

To be avoided is a lot of effort with little to show for it, the bottom-right face.

To differentiate your product, a few top-rights can make your product stand out.