In the early days of our Scrum implementation our team of 11 Product Owners used to have fairly lengthy debates as we were coming to grips with the role. Typically the discussions would turn strongly introspective, as you may imagine. As the leader of the team I was interested to discover that similar themes emerged whenever we got together without an agenda. I list them here and will elaborate on each one in future posts.
- An overarching product strategy spanning all teams is needed.
- Be careful to react to user needs rather than user solutions.
- Product Owners easily become too operational.
- Product Owners need to champion ‘less is more’.
- More agility is needed to get product proofs out quicker.
- Product Owners need to encourage teams towards optimistic development, with less optioning.
- Product Owners need to discourage teams from creating complicated implementations.
Whilst we expected the introspective tone of these discussions, we were too well aware that we don’t practice our trade in isolation of the market place. Inward-facing issues need to be sorted as quickly as possible.
What are your customers and competitors doing while you spend time trying to solve internal issues?
