Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With ...

Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With Jurgen De Smet, innovator and facilitator, coach and trainer, author and speaker, George Schlitz, Founder at ObjectiveChange Consulting, and Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO at Conteneo Inc.

Is it the responsibility of the Product Owner to do competitive analysis with other products in the market? Jurgen: This is all context dependent but I would consider a PO to be aware of competition, other products in the same problem space and overall market in order to understand how to differentiate and generate the best possible value. Luke: I agree with Jurgen. I will add that it is common for POs and PMs to engage outside firms to conduct competitive analysis. When Conteneo does competitive analysis for clients we follow the ethical guidelines of the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals (www.scip.org).

Who can be the Product Owner for a strategic initiative? Luke: Any person who is qualified to meet the requirements outlined by their organization.

Being a mini-CEO in an Agile world, what kind of metrics are the most important? Jurgen: I would go for a Balanced Scorecard that is measuring at least 7 dimensions of the system (time, tools, people, value, functionality, quality, process) from all relevant perspectives (employee, teams, managers, organization, customer, communities, suppliers). And for specific environments I do like Dave McLure’s AARRR metrics, acquisition – activation – retention – referral – revenue and/or LTV (Life Time Value). And all efforts despite it is EBITA that’s in the end the most important. See also: https://colearning.be/blog/misunderstandings-on-productivity-measurements-in-it/24062015 . Luke: In addition to Jurgen’s recommendations, I recommend considering Net Promoter Score as a means to gather data on your performance. How do you transform an organization for the Product Owner to really embody the mini-CEO role? Jurgen: You eat an elephant piece by piece, slowly with a lot of patience and humour. Luke: The question suggests that your organization may not be embracing the idea the PO is a “mini-CEO”. If that’s true, then I’d look for a root cause analysis as to why. What we see is that many POs are lacking the skills, wisdom and experience to fully execute the role of the PO. For example, they might be trained at writing User Stories but may not have training in Pricing or Distribution. They might lack skills in conducting market research, identifying

Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With Jurgen De Smet, innovator and facilitator, coach and trainer, author and speaker, George Schlitz, Founder at ObjectiveChange Consulting, and Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO at Conteneo Inc. unmet needs, training sales teams, and any number of other things that CEOs must accomplish. Accordingly, they need to develop the skills they need to earn the right to be a CEO.

Will not acting like a CEO and doing analysis distract the Product Owner? Jurgen: Being a mini CEO is thé job of a PO, writing stories is not – that’s direct interaction from team(s) with stakeholder(s). A PO might facilitate that direct interaction and this way we truly value the first of the 4 agile values mentioned: individuals and interactions. Luke: No. What do you do if the Product Owner has a rude nature towards the team, but the team is cross-functional as well as co-operative? Luke: Give them the coaching they need to succeed, help them find a job that is more suited to their values and skills or terminate their employment. Scrum and Agile represent new ways of working motivated by a different set of values. Not everyone shares these values and not everyone wants to work this way – and you can’t force them to access the values. My experience in large transformations is that somewhere between 10% and 20% of the people leave the organization because they don’t want to embrace the values and practices of Scrum.

We face a challenge of not having the business sponsor as the Product Owner, so we have to settle for an IT proxy Product Owner. How do we encourage the Product Owner to think in terms of business value instead of having too much focus on the project status report? Jurgen: Business or Proxy or Fake PO… one needs to find ways to close the feedback loop of build & learn where one wants to maximize the learning by having business users/sponsors involved. Doing so will change mindset from reporting to value generation. Luke: In this case share this webinar with your PO and encourage them to use the frameworks we presented to engage the business sponsor(s) in determining business value. I recommend the planning wall for this purpose. Briefly: A planning wall organizes a set of items such as features, projects, or user stories in two dimensions. The Y-axis captures “business value”, with higher valued items placed at the top. The X-axis captures level of effort. Teams collaborate on the placement of items, with PMs/Business leaders "controlling" the movement of items in the Y-axis and

Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With Jurgen De Smet, innovator and facilitator, coach and trainer, author and speaker, George Schlitz, Founder at ObjectiveChange Consulting, and Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO at Conteneo Inc. Engineering/Technical leaders "controlling" the movement in the X-axis. Here is a simple example of a planning wall:

Conteneo’s online platform supports many variations of Planning Walls.

How would you approach identifying a Product Owner or establishing a Product Owner in a government scenario when a “product” is regulatory-focused with government and public users, but not a single owner? There seems to be a struggle in identifying a true vision on the product and where it is headed to even get to a definition of value. Luke: Establishing and aligning the organization – whether it is one team or several teams – on a vision can be tricky. We recommend using Product Box this purpose: www.innovationgames.com/product-box.

Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With Jurgen De Smet, innovator and facilitator, coach and trainer, author and speaker, George Schlitz, Founder at ObjectiveChange Consulting, and Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO at Conteneo Inc.

Should Product Owners also be responsible for delivering ethical value, e.g., not creating "addictive" games because of concerns over the negative social effects? Luke: This is a very challenging question, especially for someone like me who has had the benefit of traveling all over the world and working in many different cultures. What I’ve learned is that what is considered “ethical” varies from person to person, culture to culture, and business domain to business domain. The framing of the question suggests that it is the person asking the question who has the ethical concerns, not the Product Owner. There are a few avenues you can explore. First, you can raise the concerns with your boss or another senior leader. Second, you could find a job that is more aligned with your personal ethics.

Is backlog management purely the Product Owner’s responsibility? Jurgen: This highly depends on what you understand by backlog management, for me a PO should build a vision for the product, clearly communicate and build interest for that vision (externally/internally). With that established he/she makes decisions on what things to pursue or not while facilitating the process of clarifying requirements directly involving the teams building stuff. If the PO is the sole person handling requirements, then errors and systemic dysfunctions will occur as we just introduced a hand-off. Luke: Please review to the official Scrum guide. What tangible aspects of value would you suggest if your products sustain a mission-based, not-for-profit organization (and cost-out is not necessarily an objective)? Jurgen: What’s the purpose of the non-profit? If that’s clear one could ask: how do we know we move forward? Luke: I am the co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit devote to increasing civic engagement. We use Innovation Games® and other techniques for this purpose. We have found that you can identify tangible aspects of value if you put some effort into the search. For example, tangible aspects of value from EVEF’s work include budget cuts to bloated city budgets, increased engagement with citizens, and greater insight into the needs and priorities of communities. You can see an example our work in Participatory Budgeting at www.d3decides.com.

Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With Jurgen De Smet, innovator and facilitator, coach and trainer, author and speaker, George Schlitz, Founder at ObjectiveChange Consulting, and Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO at Conteneo Inc.

Collaboration at Scale Webinar | Creating Value-Based Backlogs With Jurgen De Smet, innovator and facilitator, coach and trainer, author and speaker, George Schlitz, Founder at ObjectiveChange Consulting, and Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO at Conteneo Inc. How might tangible aspects relate to MVP when that might have been determined, and how do you best achieve it? Jurgen: In a startup world the MVP is not software but for example a Business Model Canvas where validation of assumptions are handled through inquiries and possibly online or face-to-face innovation games. Tangible results are here counted as number of assumptions validated over time, or experiments ran for example. Luke: I recommend systematically applying the Lean Startup framework. Does strategy influence product, or does product influence strategy? Jurgen: Both are right as this is a 2-way street. Luke: Agreed. How did Jurgen frame the spider web concept to the 60 people in that meeting to help them understand what he was trying to do? I can see having so many people in one place identifying value being a bombardment of random ideas without a really solid focal point or goal. Jurgen: You start with a common topic, instructions and then diverge into smaller groups (8-10) with a high diversity in roles etc (each group has a facilitator assigned). They work together on one spider web. Frequent integrations (round robin, carrousel…) are scheduled and at the end we consolidate or converge the results back by identifying pattern worth investing more time to explore.