Matt Kortering of Universal Mind, wrote a blog post about How UX Fits Within a SAFe Environment. Lately I’ve been thinking about and writing about the scaling models, so a part of this fits well with current themes.
But I don’t want you to get stuck on the SAFe bits here. I truly want this to be a generic blog post about handling UX concerns and x-team integration within any agile method or approach.
Here’s what Matt had to say towards the end of his post:
In order to successfully engage UX within SAFe, there are a few other things to remember…
A few years ago I quantified the 4 Quadrants of the Product Owner role as a means of communicating the depth and breadth of the role.
My intention at the time was to provide guidance to agile teams about the level of difficulty in performing within the role. I also had the intent to provide enough nuance so that Product Owners would realize that they typically would need help. That even though Scrum emphasizes a singular Product Owner per team (backlog), that more than one person might be needed to help fill all of the requisite skills and daily chores.
As part of the 4 Quadrants, I bundled the activities of a Business Analyst under the Product Owner role. It doesn’t mean that the Product Owner needs to be a Business Analyst. It just means that they have to either (1) have these skills themselves, or (2) have access to these skills within their team in order to effectively perform their job.
Scrum is all about rhythms. Teams that are successful with Scrum establish a sustainable cadence for collaborating with each other. Each of the sprint ceremonies help us move toward our goal, and remind us what’s coming next.
Scrum is pretty straightforward about how to establish the right rhythms for the team, but organizing your work as a product owner is a little murkier. You know that sprint planning happens every two weeks, but what do you need to do to prepare? Your team does backlog refinement for an hour every week, but how far in advance do you need to start working on stories to make that meeting worthwhile?
In this article, I’ll share the rhythms that have worked well for me as a product owner. The Scrum ceremonies act as a trigger – a reminder that there’s something I need to do. I’ll organize this article by those triggers, and we’ll work our way backward to see what we need to do to prepare.
For years and years, I’ve been talking about the importance of Sprint Goals in the fabric of Scrum team execution. They:
- Help to guide the focus and conversations at the daily standup and the team’s daily activity;
- Help to focus the team’s sprint planning towards an outcome;
- Help to identify the purpose and focus of the sprint demo;
- Help the Product Owner and the team in making sprint content trade-offs if the run into difficulties;
- Ultimately help the team define what “success looks like” for each and every sprint.
Given that definition, my clients usually start looking at Sprint Goals in a different way. I see them as being very powerful mechanisms for focusing the team’s efforts and I hope you start to as well.
Until they realize that:
They have to sometimes say NO to some stakeholders;
They have to make decisions; short term vs. long term; tactical vs. strategic; now vs. later;
They have to peer into the future and anticipate customer needs;
They have to aggregate opinions from multiple, sometimes very powerful and unique, voices;
They have to trust their teams;
I was in a Backlog Refinement meeting the other day and you would have thought I was in divorce court where the parties were negotiating (fighting for) everything.
Each time the team asked clarifying questions around a user story, the Product Owner would begrudgingly answer. It felt like they thought they were wasting time trying to explore the story.
It was clear that what he really wanted was…an estimate.
So the team felt the pressure and stopped asking question. Instead they went immediately into Planning Poker for each story. And as you might expect, the estimates were sort of…all over the place.
Often agile organizations take the position that the Managers, Leaders, or the Scrum Masters are responsible for keeping the team focused and energized towards their work. And yes, these roles can play a part in keeping the teams passion and energy focused towards doing great work.
But I’ve found that another role can really make a difference here as well. One that is rarely suggested for this sort of nuance. That role is the Product Owner.
To make my point, I’d like to share a dozen “opportunities” for a Scrum Product Owner to make a difference within their teams. Is the list exhaustive? Probably not. But that’s not the intent. The intent is to get Product Owners thinking outside the role of backlogs, user stories, and delivery. And instead thinking about ways where they can play a key role in the engagement, joy, energy, passion, focus, and results of their teams.
Yes, I just added another large responsibility to an already overwhelming role. Sorry about that.
I read a wonderful article the other day that surrounded some specific techniques for portfolio management.
Here’s a link to the article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/visual-portfolio-management
I immediately thought of the SAFe guidance for portfolios and just really enjoyed the simplicity and practicality of the approaches in the article.
For example, the article diagram illustrates visually how an organization is moving portfolio items from Idea…to Live or “Cash”. Clearly it’s a Kanban approach, but I don’t believe there is exhaustive analysis (business cases, etc.) for each idea. The board simply radiates the portfolio and each item moves forward based on (1) it’s on merit and (2) the organization determining that it has value.
Jason Tanner is a colleague of mine here in the Cary, NC area. He’s a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with the Scrum Alliance, which means he can teach certified ScrumMaster and Product Owner classes.
With that title and role comes a responsibility to stay pure to the “rules” of Scrum and its defined practices.
So, Jason will often argue with me about specific agile practices such as:
- Sprint #0’s
- Hardening Sprints
- Release Trains & Planning
As (1) not being part of Core Scrum, and he’s certainly right about that, and (2) just being plane old bad practices. It’s here that I sometimes push back a bit on Jason, thinking that he might be a bit too purist in his approach and thinking.
But it’s all done in good humor and with respect. Or at least I think it is. But that’s beside the point.
I was reading a post from Rich Mironov that I simply had to share. Here’s a link to the post: http://www.mironov.com/8mistakes/
The title was: Eight Mistakes You’ll (Probably) Make in Your First Product Management Job.
My favorite of his eight items was #6 - Tell engineers how to solve technical problems and #8 – Confuse process steps with market steps.
You’ll want to share this with your Product Managers and Product Owners independent of their experience and role.
Rich is one of the leading voices in the “product community” and well worth listening to.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
