Agile Software Development

This Saturday I am leaving for the US-based course on Product Management. So I thought it could be a good idea to share my thoughts on the difference between the product management and the Agile Product Owner (Scrum) or Customer (XP) role.

Background

I come from software development. I was an engineer, system analyst, engineer again, senior engineer and chief engineer of the department for a decade. During last several years I was learning and practicing Agile and especially Scrum as a local consultant, evangelist, propagandist and Scrum Master. As permanent readers might remember earlier this year I moved to Product Management hoping to be able to help with the effective prioritization issues and Product Manager position seemed to be the easiest path for playing the Scrum Product Owner role. I indeed became a co-Product Owner for a development team. However, naturally I started spending some time on figuring out the "general Product Management" as well.

Here at DTS, we're very focused on consulting-type software development. As such, we have very direct access to our end users and customers. Our work is "clearly" defined and prioritized by our customers and we receive direct customer feedback every two weeks. We do not have a dispersed customer base, it's usually a single organization. However, last week I had lunch with a friend who does more "shrink-wrap" development. His customers and end-users never define or prioritize their needs. In fact, unless it's by pure happenstance, the developers never meet or know their customers. The functionality and feature set for the software is defined by an internal customer proxy who has his "finger on the pulse of the customer".

Now a disclaimer: I've never worked on a shrink-wrap team, I've always been on consulting development teams. Given that little disclaimer, I don't understand how a customer proxy can really define what an entire unseen, unknown customer base really needs.

Last week while taking the Certified Scrum Product Owner course in Oslo I had a pleasure to have an interview with our trainer Mike Cohn, an author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied. Mike shared his point of view on the value of yet another certified Scrum Alliance course and provided advices for those going to become Scrum Product Owners.

Disclaimer: I came to the class, because I already knew Mike as one of the best trainers I've ever seen. I have also been to several other classes by him. It might have made my opinion biased.

Since after I went to product management and found out that Scrum Alliance started offering the Certified Product Owner (CPO) classes I was thinking about taking this class, but was not really sure. After all I did know what Scrum was about, had quite some practical and consulting Scrum Master experience, I was even educating some Product Owners around. What new could the Product Owner class offer to me?

Scrum teams as well as the teams applying another agile software development processes build software iteratively. Sprint by sprint they release increments of software that is DONE. Planning in Scrum is also done iteratively. Low priority coarse grained backlog items are refined when they come close to the top of the backlog. The purpose of such an iterative planning and releasing is not to maintain the original project coarse, but to continuously adapt to the changing business requirements and to the increased understanding of the technology and the subject area.

Product owner is one of the three Scrum roles. The responsibilities of the Scrum product owner are pretty much the ones of any businessman. Product owner decides what the project is all about, who is going to benefit from it and what the project priorities are. He is the one who secures funding, cares about the return on investment (ROI) and manages money.

Retrospectives initially were not a part of Scrum at all. There was supposed to be a retrospective part during the sprint review. Over the time it evolved into two separate sections: Sprint Review focused on what and Sprint Retrospective focused on how.

Sometimes there are customers who "generally" agree to using Scrum as a software development process, but fail to fulfill the product owner role. What do you as a team do then?