Vasco (4:01)

What's your approach?

Host (4:02)

To try to show the benefit to the product owners of including the team in the conversation early on, when thinking about features or designing features.

Sara Di Gregorio (4:13)

Yes, I experiment the user story mapping. And first of all, I had a workshop with them, so with the team and the product owner to explain what the user story mapping is. And then we are using it. So we create a moment where the product owner explains from his point of view, from her point of view, what they want to deliver. So what they would like to see in the product. And then the team ask a lot of questions to understand, why do you want this? Not only, okay, so I will do it. No, for me, it was very important to give attention to why uproductone want this feature, want this on the product. What I understood is that the product owner, with this exercise understood that they can also change their mindset talking with the developers. It doesn't mean that the developers said, okay, no, we cannot do this. No, the developers are normally not only developers, but are users of this product, for example, so they can give their point of view. From a technical point of view, it's like, okay, but if we do in this way, we can be faster and then you can try your product faster and give us a feedback. But also because they can, as a user, give their opinion and make the product owner reflecting. So what I saw is that with the user story mapping at the beginning of each development, it's helping a lot the team to understand the big picture of what the the product owner is asking for them and the product owner to reflect on what she's asking. So I think that this is the right approach to solve this problem.

Host (6:40)

I think. I really love user story mapping in general. But as you were just saying, it creates dialogue, right? It doesn't start from the perspective that somebody has all the answers. It starts from the perspective that we're creating the narrative. Right? Like that's why it's called user story. There's a narrative. We're creating the narrative together. So definitely a shout out to Jeff Patton for the user story mapping promotion that he did way back when. I'll put the link in the show notes to the original blog post, which I think is a great blog post to read even today. But now we turn our attention to great Product owners, Sarah, because there's many of them out there. So shout out to them as well. But share with us potentially the best product owner you've ever worked with. How did they work?

Sara Di Gregorio (7:26)

Okay. I'm very lucky I think because I'm working with product owners that in my opinion are a very great example to follow. So in this moment of my working life, I am really very happy. I think that one of the key strength is the ability to build a strong collaborative relationship with the Scrum team. We constantly exchange feedback so we don't wait for the Sprint review with the shared goal and improving both our collaborating and the way of working. So from a practical point of view, we involve the team as I said before in the user story mapping. So after the analysis phases, the analysis phase and for what I saw this creates an open discussion around upcoming topics, helps the team surface potential dependencies. So and I think it's very, very, very important. Another important skill that they demonstrate to have is the availability. So they always have. They always are ready to answer questions from the team to clarify details. We always find a moment during the day to to be present with the team. For example, they are observer in the daily standup. So there. So if the team needs so can we have a five minutes talking later. And for me it's very important to give this availability. So it's very important so that they don't attend to the Scrum events only as attendees, but as engaged contributors. I see how they open encourage the open dialogue, for example, also during the retrospective they help a lot because they are interested in working with the team. So they are not only the business part, but they are into the team. They are very interested. And I think that this communication, this five episode, I always come to the communication because I think it's as that we have to train every day and helps a lot to bring clarification.

Host (10:05)

And great product owners kind of naturally have that ability to communicate. They don't come in with the idea that they know everything. They don't come in with the idea that they must do everything alone, even if they don't do it, if they don't know about it. But they come in with the idea that we're doing this together, they're collaborating. They use this, as you said, communication skills, which is so important.

Vasco (10:29)

Thank you for sharing all of these.

Host (10:30)

Stories with us this week, Sara. It's been a pleasure to have you as a guest here on the podcast. We're getting close to the end though. But before we go, where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing.

Sara Di Gregorio (10:43)

Well, you can find something on LinkedIn. Sara Di Gregorio I'm not very social, so I don't post a lot of things, but when I see something that it's very important for me, I try to repost because I always think that it's important to give the opportunity to the important post on the social to be written by everyone.

Host (11:13)

Yeah, absolutely. So we'll put the link to sara's page on LinkedIn, so be sure to check out her post stream and why not ask a few follow up questions. I'm sure there's a lot we can all learn from each other as a community. Sara, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for being here and for being so generous with your time and your knowledge.

Sara Di Gregorio (11:33)

The pleasure is mine. So thank you very much to you for giving me this opportunity. It was very nice, so thank you very much.

Vasco (11:43)

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Host (13:33)

Slack.

Outro Voice (13:35)

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Sara Di Gregorio (13:52)

Sam.