Product Owner

User Stories: Lack of Big Picture Leads to Blind Man Product

One of the Scrum values is “Focus”. It can make or mar a product. It brings direction to the development of a product – from start to finish; and is the back-bone of an effective business strategy.

Having said that, overdo it and the tables are turned. Fret too much over ‘focus’ and what could have been a blessing may become your curse.

Here’s why:

Analyse this picture. Highly focused teams (teams seeing project from sprint to sprint) may well become blind to the big picture perspective.

Scrum Product Owner Has to Kiss Lot of Frogs to Find a Prince

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

I, am going to draw an interesting parallel – between a fairy tale princess and a Scrum Product Owner (PO). Just as the fairy tale princess may need to kiss many frogs before she finds her prince charming; a Scrum Product Owner has to do a lot of de-cluttering of backlog to identify features that will make his product successful.

Innovations go through several attempts before light bulb moments strike. Steve Jobs said, “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything, it’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.”

Backlog grooming and it’s prioritization directs the team and keeps it focused. Certainly, there are different aspects you need to consider for prioritization like uncertainty, risk, dependencies, effort, releasability and value etc.

How to Use Sprint Burndown Chart in Daily Stand-up and Sprint Retrospective

by Avienaash Shiralige 1 Comment

Sprint Burndown chart and Daily Stand-up help Scrum teams in Self-Organisation. Never use Sprint burndown chart in sprint review. Sprint Burndown is inward facing, i.e it is for Scrum Team.

This chart summarise overall how team is doing? Every impediment, every challenge team faced, colloboration issues etc all get summarised in this chart. Teams need to update the tasks with time remaining in hours to get this chart. Scrum Master prints and analyses this updated Burndown before daily stand-up and brings it to the meeting.

Product Owner Role in Sprint Review(Sprint Demo)

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

Sprint Review meeting facilitates developing a successful product. Hence it is a very good avenue for scrum team to directly interact with stakeholder to get their perspective. Product Owner(PO) who is responsible for overall product should facilitate having all the stakeholders like Marketing, Sales, Senior management, End Users to the demo.

In my last post where-in I discussed about Product Owner responsibility of Accepting or Rejecting user stories as and when it gets DONE. Only accepted stories will go to Sprint Demo. Product Owner kicks-off Sprint review meeting where-in he compares product increment(accepted stories) with current sprint goal to the stakeholders.

Should Teams Go for Multiple Demos within a Sprint?

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

Many scrum teams believe and practice sprint demo as part of sprint review meeting. Because Scrum says so. Formal demo end of sprint is a minimum requirement as per scrum guide. But it is not stopping you from doing more of so.

I strongly believe in the principle that if you see value in doing something, then do it more often like testing, frequent code commits etc.

Sprint end demo should NOT be the place where you are showcasing the product for the first time to your Product Owner(PO). You Should or Must go for more informal demos all through out the sprint. Product owner should be able to see what is being built all through out the sprint rather than just end of the sprint. Ideally if your user stories are small then you should be able to finish them after very couple of days.