Transcript
A (0:04)
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B (1:04)
Do it now.
A (1:05)
But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
B (1:11)
Hello everybody. Welcome to our Friday TGIF episode about product owners of course this week with Natalia Kurusi. Hey Natalia, welcome back.
C (1:20)
Hello Vasco. Hello.
B (1:23)
Pleasure to have you and to have this final podcast of the week about such an important role in Scrum, which is the product owner. We'll talk about what great product owners do and how they act in a minute. But first Natalia, share with us potentially the worst product owner anti pattern that you've witnessed in your career.
C (1:46)
That's a funny one. Actually that was one particular situation that was pretty recently. So I worked with one person that is a great subject matter expert. So she, that person was a very, very good domain knowledge. So she was very, very knowledgeable in what she was doing. The thing is that the organization decided to adopt agility and to move everybody into that agile space. So that person got assigned the product owner role without her willingness. So she didn't volunteer for being a bio product owner. That role was just assigned like a sticky note to her. The fact is that she had another responsibilities as well. So about she was like loaded about 80% of her time. She was doing another stuff and on top of that she was asked to do like a product ownership for us as well. So in addition to that that person didn't receive any kind of formal training or certification on product ownership. Nobody understood or set up the expectations of what a product owner means. So that was she was coming from the place of very big frustration about the fact that she need to do product ownership on the top of what she was already doing. She didn't understand what the expectation so he understanding was that she need to do kind of traditional project management role. So she need to do command control, I don't know, to measure the schedules, to measure the budgets and other stuff. So despite the fact that she had a great, great domain knowledge, she didn't understand the dynamic of the team. So we actually, we had a very funny situation. So when we just started working on that project, that person that was a product owner, she brought us like a huge spreadsheet with all the requirements that she wanted. So that spreadsheet was elaborated by another company. So that was another consultancy company that just delivered that kind of requirements to have. I have a big spreadsheet and I say okay, this is what you need to implement. Our team, we had product persons, we had developers, we have testers and they decided to approach the situation a different way. So they wanted to do UI ux, they wanted to do the users feedback, the users interviews, they wanted to do to understand what the problem is before going to the solution now space, solution space. So we did that. The product owner didn't stop us. We did discovery, we did inception, we did a huge amount of story already in the backlog and features and so on. And then at some point when we were almost ready to release, she remembered about that spreadsheet. She just said look, it's all very good, I don't understand why I need to approve. Can you please map what you just did in your user stories with my spreadsheet? And that was like after two or three months of working. So before she was not working on spreadsheet, she was still working on a spreadsheet. So that was not very pleasant situation.