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Agile and the Product Owner
At my company, we're on two-week sprints. The pressure on Product Owners to collect and write business-ready stories, justify them, understand them and the fight for their priority all while working with dev and business on the current sprint is sometimes just too much. We don't schedule in our own time for research, planning and review.
This is not an uncommon situation; as I talk with other product owners at different companies, this is a common theme.
I am looking for suggestions on how to pull the team up from the 'feature management' focus and into a whole-product focus. Any ideas you can share?
I also wanted to point people towards a case study on Agile and the Product Owner from the BBC: http://www.springerlink.com/content/c220542871980285/fulltext.pdf
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Don Vendetti on -
This is also similar to what happens in waterfall between releases when the product manager is trying to launch while also pumping out the next MRD. The problem is just too much stuff to do at a point in time than can be supported.
Here are 4 generic options:
1. Reduce the amount of work - this is likely not so easy to do, or not desirable.
2. Phase the tasks - while you can't really change the timing of the tasks, maybe you can change the structure of the team such that some are focused on the current sprint while others are doing the planning for the next sprint and then swap as the sprints progress.
3. Specialize within the team - another is to develop specialization within the product management team such that all are not product owners, and some are pure product managers/product marketers doing more of the research and outbound tasks and you have a matrixed organization.
4. Add dedicated resources - Lastly, consider a hierarchical product owner team, and add business analysts or more technical-focused product owners having day-to-day responsibility working with Dev, and Lead Product Owners who are overseeing, but only needing to spend 30-50% of their time with the team and the rest of the time doing planning and are externally focused.
The solution is not obvious and there are multiple alternatives, but all have trade-offs, however if the current situation doesn't work so well.....
Don
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Permalink Reply by Val on -
Thanks, Don. This is interesting thinking. One of our challenges is that the product owners are scattered throughout the organization and most of them have other responsibilities. Our management does not support a focused product management function so we have product owners assigned to products who have never been product owners, don't report to product management and are limited in the time they can devote.
Is anyone else working in this dispersed way?
I like the idea, Don, of specializing. We have a member of the team who is more marketing and maybe we can repurpose his position to take all the launch work. Hmm. Brain is thinking.
Don Vendetti said:This is also similar to what happens in waterfall between releases when the product manager is trying to launch while also pumping out the next MRD. The problem is just too much stuff to do at a point in time than can be supported.
Here are 4 generic options:
1. Reduce the amount of work - this is likely not so easy to do, or not desirable.
2. Phase the tasks - while you can't really change the timing of the tasks, maybe you can change the structure of the team such that some are focused on the current sprint while others are doing the planning for the next sprint and then swap as the sprints progress.
3. Specialize within the team - another is to develop specialization within the product management team such that all are not product owners, and some are pure product managers/product marketers doing more of the research and outbound tasks and you have a matrixed organization.
4. Add dedicated resources - Lastly, consider a hierarchical product owner team, and add business analysts or more technical-focused product owners having day-to-day responsibility working with Dev, and Lead Product Owners who are overseeing, but only needing to spend 30-50% of their time with the team and the rest of the time doing planning and are externally focused.
The solution is not obvious and there are multiple alternatives, but all have trade-offs, however if the current situation doesn't work so well.....
Don
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