Phillip Starke
Don´t get me wrong, many software tools are fantastic products. I use a wide variety daily. However, I feel like their impact is overvalued. Or maybe, to put it better, I think they are misused. Far too often is some new license for a tool purchased because “we are not meeting our targets”. The hope is then that the tool magically solves everything. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.
Can Scrum and a Scrum team work without a Scrum Master? The short answer is yes. I believe it is possible. The longer answer is a bit more complicated. The Scrum Master Role was created for good reason and not having one will lead to some negative effects.
It generally seems to be the case that we have too many ideas for improvements but not enough time to do them all right away. Therefore, backlogs tend to become large. In order to be able to handle this, it is so important to organize the backlog in a structured way.
Writing a user story is not rocket science. Nevertheless, it is a point of significant leverage for the success of product development. As such, I feel that the task is undervalued. Thus, this post describes how to write user stories.
The Product Owner (PO) is an extremely important role that includes a diverse set of responsibilities and an empowered PO can have a tremendous impact on product development, if he or she is able to handle the many jobs of a PO. This raises the question of what skills are needed to do just that. Thus, in this third installment of the series on the PO I will focus on answering the question What are the core competencies of a Product Owner?
In general, it seems most people agree that remote work is a net positive but it also poses some challenges. Very underrated are the effects of remote work on company culture. The challenges to building a real team are probably more obvious. Nevertheless, I feel they are worth addressing.
A PO has many responsibilities, too many to mention them all here. I will focus on the three that are in my view the most important.
The text is very much an answer to the question “Why is the Product Owner needed?” or “Why is the Product Owner important?”. However, much of what I write below is also valid for project leaders or team leads within product development - even if those teams are not working with Scrum or other agile methods.
Now that the intense part of the corona pandemic is over (fingers crossed), companies and teams are transitioning to a permanent new normal, and figuring out how to do so. Thus, now is a good time to write down some thoughts on how to deal with the effects of remote work, specifically on company culture.
I recently wrote about the benefits of doing one thing at a time and the downsides of Multitasking. While listing things that can be done to facilitate doing one thing after another for a team, I completely missed to mention maybe the most important factor: having a dedicated team.
