This blog post, which will actually become a “series” as I
keep adding references to it, was inspired by Bhavani Rao. Bhavani is a Product
Manager who lives in my neighborhood. He’s trying to make the transition to
Agile Product Management (Ownership) and is finding it difficult to gain entry
without real world experience. So a catch-22 if you will.
The focus of this blog is to provide a lean (but robust) set
of references for “would be” Scrum Product Owners and “newbie” Product Owners
to help them in their journey. But don’t expect it to be easy or to only read a
few blog posts. The role of Product Owner is deep, broad, challenging and
downright intimidating. That is – if you want to be GREAT.
I hope you do and I hope this helps…
Bhavani – this one’s for you ;-)
One of my favorite movies of all time is A Few Good Men with
Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. I can picture that highly charged confrontation
at the end clearly in my mind. You know the one.
Tom Cruise says—I want
the Truth…
And Jack Nicholson
leans forward, with that classic look, and says—
You Can’t Handle the
Truth!
What a climax to the film. I get chills every time I watch
that scene.
I’ve been thinking more and more in my coaching about why
leaders and managers often wait too long to ask for agile coaching help. I
think it’s a general phenomenon in agile (and non-Agile) teams and
organizations, but for the purposes of this article, I want to focus upward—on
“them”.
I’ve been sharing about agile methods for over ten years at conferences and workshops. One of the top three questions I always receive from attendees is:
Does agile work with distributed teams?
And sometimes the question is phrased another way:
That notion of co-located teams is nice in theory Bob, but in the real life, we have team members all over the world. We need to cobble together teams based on our business needs from wherever they are. Does “agile” support that level of highly distributed teams?
I often smile at the repetitiveness of the question. It indicates clearly that enterprise level software development is often distributed. It also indicates that outsourcing is still alive and well. I’ll try to provide some answers to these questions by sharing two stories of distributed teams I have experienced.
If you've been listening to our Meta-casts lately, Josh and I have been talking about the role of the Product Owner quite a bit.
We've been discussing questions like:
- Do you need one?
- If you do, what is the 'profile' of an excellent Product Owner?
- What do they do all day?
- Etc.
We've then been talking about a view I have about the role and the four key areas that you need to cover in order to do the role justice. I talked about them in my Scrum Product Owner book:
- the role is part Product Management
- part Project Management
- part Leadership
- and finally, part Business Analyst
I wish I would have come up with the "quadrants" notion when I was working on the 2'nd edition of the book...but, I didn't. But now I AM talking about the nuances of the role from a quadrants perspective.
