Product Manager
I don’t know about you, but the word ‘grooming’ has some very negative connotations for me. It can be used entirely innocently – such as in the context of pet grooming, or for personal grooming – but certainly here in Ireland and the UK the word is often associated with child exploitation and abuse. So …
Sometimes it’s hard to break down a user story into smaller parts. There’s a piece of work, and it seems that it all needs to be done together, but it’s much too large to fit into a single sprint, so what do we do? Horizontal vs Vertical It’s often tempting to slice a story horizontally. …
With many companies around the world asking staff to work from home during the current COVID-19 virus outbreak, we’re all having to adapt to a new way of working. So how do we, as Product Owners / Managers, help keep our team productive during this time? Communication is everything When everyone is working from home …
Both are junior members of staff without much prior experience. Mario is taking on his first role as a Product Owner and Julia is a Developer. How are they both supported and trained when they join their agile squad? Julia joins a team of experienced developers, and she can spend some time shadowing other team …
As a Product Owner its tempting to try and capture as much detail as possible on a user story. I might start with a simple requirement, but then end up adding loads of additional information! Of course, we all know that a user story, at its essence is just meant to be a statement in …
In an ideal world, there should be one Product Owner for one agile development team or squad. Or at a stretch, maybe one Product Owner for two teams, if they’re working on the same backlog. At the moment, I’m not in that ideal world. My current project has five squads working on different epics, and …
The Scrum Master for my team left for a new role at the end of August, and since then we’ve been without a dedicated Scrum Master. My role is that of the Product Owner, but in the past I’ve covered some of the duties of the Scrum Master (keeping the show on the road) during …
I like that we have a Definition of Ready for our stories. As a Product Owner it gives me confidence that I’ve done my job properly in analysing and communicating the requirements, and also that the team is ready to hit the ground running when the sprint starts. Lately, however, it’s been more of a …
The whole subject of measuring performance of agile teams is a divisive one. In an ideal world we should be looking to measure the value delivered by a team, rather than collecting performance statistics. After all, our primary goal in agile is to deliver some value to the product or customer. But measuring value isn’t …
How often does your sprint goal or stories change in the middle of the sprint? A late-breaking requirement or bug comes in, or a manager pops up with an urgent task, and before you know it your sprint is totally overloaded. Does that sound familiar? Teams often think they’re being agile by responding to changing …