I’ve written a lot about product ownership, product backlogs, and user stories over the years. But the other day it struck me that I hadn’t shared something that has worked well for me for many years.
It’s an idea that is coupled to two notions—product backlog refinement and the 3-Amigos metaphor for story evolution.
I noticed in several companies I’ve worked for that teams struggled with getting the stories effectively delivered. There seemed to be, for lack of a better phrase, a lack of ownership in story delivery. That is, stories often missed the mark in functionality, quality, integration, etc. And when we discussed this in our retrospectives, there was a lot of finger-pointing and blaming, but no real solution ideas.
I believe I tried this first at a company called ChannelAdvisor around 2007-2008. So, you can see why I’m surprised that I haven’t thought to share it until now.