Key takeouts from attending Certified Scrum Product Owner training

I work in a dedicated cross-functional and lean software development team at Equinox IT. I’m a Product Lead responsible for client liaison and attend, for example, change advisory board and business meetings to understand what’s required in upcoming releases and deployment phases.

I enjoy interacting with my clients and understanding how we are helping make things better through our programmes of constant improvement. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to see a product we’ve developed being deployed and used.

In July I attended our Equinox IT Certified Scrum Product Owner course held in Auckland with Certified Scrum Trainer Rowan Bunning of Scrum WithStyle.

Scrum is a set of practices about how you do things. These practices are based on agile and lean principles. Rowan brought a great lean thinking approach to the Product Owner training that reinforced the lessons learned from the Equinox IT hosted Mary and Tom Poppendieck Lean Mindset workshop, which I attended in June.

What‘s the role of a Certified Scrum Product Owner?
There are a number of defined roles in Scrum including Scrum Product Owner and ScrumMaster. The Scrum Product Owner is responsible for managing and controlling the product backlog and we’re responsible for the overall value being delivered to the business from the work being done.

We work closely with the development team to communicate the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of key items. The development team decides the ‘how’ of these items. Every role in a Scrum development team has a defined focus. The Product Owner role is mostly concerned with ‘developing the right thing’ while the team focus is on ‘developing the thing right’.

The Scrum Master’s role is to remove impediments and help the team to learn and to apply practices to achieve success.

Key course takeouts:

Seeing both sides of the picture
My first takeout from this course was the value of the Product Owner seeing both sides of the picture – to understand not only the needs of the client and their business domain, but also to know what it takes for a development team to deliver a solution. The Product Owner is not the person who decides technically what is to be done—that is a ‘how’ that the team collectively decides, but having insights into the development process is valuable for a Product Owner. I would also say that being available and accessible to the team to help communicate the direction of the project is very desirable.

Tune and adjust – the PDCA cycle
The greatest waste in software development is building features that are not used, or are not valuable to the customer. Requirements will change as the project progresses, and therefore each sprint allows for flexibility akin to the PDCA cycle, to adjust and refine the product to ensure it meets the customer’s changing needs.
PLAN Sprint Planning – planning the new sprint
DO Daily Scrum – doing the work, learning by doing
CHECK  Sprint Review – review product increments with the customer to help ensure the right product is built
ACT Sprint Retrospective – continuous improvement by acting on what was learned

Product Backlog
The Product Backlog is a queue of items that are needed to create a successful product.  This continuously evolves as the project progresses. The Product Owner is responsible for prioritising the Product Backlog in a way that maximises success and focuses on delivering value to customers and ensures that the items are visible, allowing the team to understand the items and what needs to be done next.  Prioritisation is done in partnership with the customer and the team, adding or promoting items that arise or become more important, and similarly removing or demoting items that are now no longer as important.  It is not until the product items move up the product backlog ‘iceberg’ that they are further elaborated and defined. Due to the evolving nature of requirements and priorities changing it is wasteful to spend time fully detailing something that may no longer be important to the customer.  Rather than finding resources to fit the work, the Product Backlog serves as an appropriately defined pipeline of items that are ready to be included in the team’s workload based on their current capacity. This harnesses the benefits of a self-organising team allowing them to take responsibility for and decide on what can be accommodated into each development sprint.

Summary: How the Product Owner helps maximise value
The Product Owner harnesses the benefits of having a dedicated, self-organising, cross-functional team who take collective responsibility for what they deliver. At the beginning of each sprint, the team make a commitment to what they can deliver, and are then responsible for that commitment. The Product Owner interacts with the client and the development team by building in regular feedback sessions to evaluate progress and refine the content and direction of the product, working together through the project to achieve a shared goal.

In my Product Lead role with Equinox IT, I’m focused on helping to create the right environment so that the team can achieve their commitments, and create a valuable product for our customers. My aim is for our team to delight our customers by not only building it right, but by building the right thing.

About Valerie Rowe
Val is a Product Lead within Equinox IT's Business Application and Product Development Practice. She has worked for 22 years in the information technology industry and began her career as a systems and network administrator before moving through to technical consulting, software testing and product lead roles at Equinox IT.

About Rowan Bunning
Rowan Bunning is a pioneer in Australia of the Scrum agile project management approach. With a background in web and object-oriented software design, Rowan became Australia's first Certified Scrum Practitioner and Certified Scrum Trainer. He has built extensive experience training, coaching and leading Agile adoptions across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and has worked as an Agile Coach and Scrum Master at one of Europe's leading agile consultancies.