Product owners have many challenges:
They need to keep at least two thoughts about the product: what it needs to be in the near future, and what the organization wants it to be in the (distant) future. Some product owners think they're supposed to fill out a complete backlog, including all the UI designs for the product before the team can start. (That's a more traditional product requirements document, and I've never seen that work.)
But the biggest problem I see is this: Effective product owners belong to at least two teams and maybe more.
Consider These Product “Owner” Teams
Effective product owners need to collaborate with several kinds of teams:
- They work with “their” feature/product team, to write stories and create good backlogs for the near-term work.
- They work with someone, often called a product manager, to create roadmaps for the longer term. (See the roadmap series.) However, in a small organization, that someone might be a VP, not a product manager. So the product owner works alone. (Strategic work.)
- On a larger product, they work with a product value team, especially if they have to collaborate with other product owners on a program. (Often, a combination of strategy and tactics.)
- And, they might need to collaborate across the organization with a variety of product and portfolio leaders if the organization wants to EOL (End of Life) one product and start a new kind of business. (Move between strategy and tactics and back again.) For lack of a better word, I'll call this the product strategy team.
What happens when one person is supposed to do it all? They can't. We know that overloaded computers thrash. As do people. The product owners feel the same way. They feel the push and pull of strategy and tactics—and they can't do it all.
Sometimes, that overload occurs when the organization focuses on the strategic work for “too long” and the product owner rarely works with the team.
The Absent Product Owner
When the product owner is mostly absent (When You Have No Product Owner At All), what happens to the team? Too often, the team no longer considers the product owner as a team member—even though the product owner needs to be an integrated team member.
If you were on a team and someone jumped into your planning meeting and said, “We're doing x, y, z, end of discussion,” how might you react?
You're probably nicer than I am, but I might well tell that person that they don't get to vanish for two weeks and then tell us what to do. I might even say to go pound sand. But that's why you are nicer than I am.
When people don't build trust every single day by working together, trust evaporates.
And that might be why the product owner and the team cannot agree on a sprint goal. (The original problem in Part 1.)
While the product owner needs to be a member of the team, if the other people don't trust the product owner, there's no way they can be a member of the team.
That's one reason a team might not agree with a product owner on a sprint goal in a reasonable time. Then there's the problem of this product vs. other products. Does the team understand all the organization's tactics and strategies?
Clarification of Tactics and Strategies
On a program, I hope that the product owners all get together on a regular basis and discuss the various tactics to serve this product's strategy. And I also hope that any organization that wants to EOL one product would explain to everyone the value of the new product and how to wind down the old product.
But that's not what I see in my consulting.
Instead, I don't see a product value team. And I see too little corporate discussion of why this strategy or why these tactics. The product owner does not have anyone else to talk with, to clarify the tactics and strategies.
That creates a problem for the product owners. They might see a path that the team cannot. Or, the team might see paths the product owner cannot. And if all of them don't work together on a regular basis, they are not a single, combined team.
That's when the team and the product owner cannot agree on a sprint goal.
I suspect that the people who framed the interview question have not yet seen an integrated team, where the product owner is a valuable member of that team. That's why they framed the question this way:
“The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal. What should the Scrum Master do?”
While it is useful to ask what the Scrum Master should do, let's consider what the product owner can do.
Work Tactics for Product Owners
If you are a product owner, I'm going to assume you are overloaded. In that case, consider when you will:
- Work with the team, to workshop stories and plan the next bit of work.
- Work with any product managers or whomever, to clarify the product strategy.
- Consider who and when to work across the organization, either as part of a product value team or as part of a product strategy team.
Choose where to spend your time and how. If you consciously make choices about tactics and strategy, you can maintain the team's trust, build the product tactics, and create/clarify the various strategies.
The more you collaborate with a specific team, the more you can build trust with that team. Product owners need to build trust with their feature/product team and with their product value team. Yes, to create effective product strategies and tactics, you will need to be a full-fledged member of at least two teams.
You will have to decide which work to relinquish. I would stop writing stories by myself. And I would never try to specify the UI. Instead, I would describe the outcomes I want from a UI. And those never-ending requests for extensive roadmaps? Please do see the roadmap series.
You will have to say No to some work so you can say Yes to the work that matters. And only you know which collaborations matter more right now.
The Series:
- How Product Goals Make it Easier to Create Sprint Goals and Reduce Feature Factories, Part 1
- How to Reduce Planning Time to Create Better Goals at All Levels, Part 2
- Integrate Product Owners into Many Teams to Create Good Product Goals, Part 3
- How Scrum Masters Use Facilitative Leadership Especially When Planning, Part 4
- How Interview Questions Reveal the True Organizational Assumptions & Culture, Part 5