The Pressure Conduit, aka The Tornado Product Owner | Chrissy Fleming

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

Episode: The Pressure Conduit, aka The Tornado Product Owner | Chrissy Fleming
Host: Vasco Duarte, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner
Guest: Chrissy Fleming, Product Owner and Scrum Master
Release Date: February 7, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte engages in a deep and insightful conversation with Chrissy Fleming, a seasoned Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master. The episode, titled "The Pressure Conduit, aka The Tornado Product Owner", delves into the challenges and best practices associated with the dual roles of PO and Scrum Master, providing listeners with valuable strategies to enhance their Agile practices.

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Identifying the Product Owner Anti-Pattern

The discussion kicks off with Chrissy addressing a prevalent anti-pattern observed in Product Owners. She states:

“I think the worst anti pattern for a PO is being a bad conduit of the leadership's volatility... [03:41]”
— Chrissy Fleming

Chrissy elaborates on how some POs, especially in startup environments, become mere "order takers" who pass down volatile directives from leadership to their teams without understanding or mitigating the underlying issues. This behavior often results in toxic pressure, overwhelming stress, and diminished team morale.

Key Points:

• Egomaniac Tendencies: While extreme egocentric behavior is detrimental, Chrissy emphasizes that being a conduit for leadership's unpredictability can be equally harmful.
• Impact on Teams: Passing on urgent demands without context creates an unstable work environment, leading to burnout and decreased productivity.
• Common Scenarios: Frequent changes in priorities from volatile CEOs or leaders force POs into reactive stances, disrupting the team's workflow and commitment.

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Strategies to Overcome the Anti-Pattern

Transitioning from problem identification, Chrissy offers actionable strategies to help POs and Scrum Masters navigate and mitigate these challenges:

“Defend the sprint and really try to cover the team... [04:26]”
— Chrissy Fleming

Actionable Strategies:

1. Defend the Sprint:

   • Commitment: Ensure that the team adheres to the sprint goals, protecting them from mid-sprint disruptions.
   • Future Planning: Open discussions about upcoming changes should be directed to future sprints rather than interrupting the current one.

2. Gather Context:

   • Understanding Requests: Engage with stakeholders to comprehend the business case behind new requests. Chrissy suggests asking critical questions to discern whether the demand is strategic or arbitrary.
   • Articulating Trade-offs: Clearly communicate the implications of deviating from planned work, highlighting how changes affect existing priorities and deliverables.

3. Use Metrics to Demonstrate Impact:

   • Visual Evidence: Present data on how churn affects team performance and project outcomes to reinforce the importance of maintaining a stable sprint backlog.

4. Build a Strong Partnership:

   • Scrum Master as an Ally: Chrissy underscores the importance of Scrum Masters supporting POs by representing the team's interests and providing a buffer against excessive external pressures.

Example Scenario: Chrissy shares her experience at Trade Coffee, where a PO struggled against a CEO's frequent changes. Through mentorship and strategic defense of sprints, Chrissy helped the PO articulate the negative impacts of constant alterations, ultimately fostering a more stable and focused team environment.

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The Role of Scrum Masters in Supporting Product Owners

Chrissy highlights the pivotal role Scrum Masters play in assisting POs to avoid anti-patterns:

“Having a Scrum Master that is looking out for the team... [04:26]”
— Chrissy Fleming

Key Responsibilities:

• Advocacy: Scrum Masters advocate for the team's well-being, ensuring that POs do not become overwhelmed by volatile leadership demands.
• Facilitation: They facilitate discussions that help POs understand and manage stakeholder expectations effectively.
• Partnership: Building a collaborative relationship with POs to navigate challenges jointly, much like the metaphor of Batman and Robin.

Chrissy emphasizes that this partnership is essential for maintaining team morale and ensuring that the Agile framework remains effective and meaningful.

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Characteristics of Great Product Owners

Shifting the focus to positive examples, Chrissy describes the attributes that make for an exceptional Product Owner:

“I really get to understand the customer and I advocate for their needs... [11:47]”
— Chrissy Fleming

Attributes of an Effective PO:

1. Customer-Centric Approach:

   • Empathy: Deep understanding of customer needs through direct engagement, such as interviews and site visits.
   • Advocacy: Championing the customer's voice within the team to ensure that product development aligns with real-world problems.

2. Collaborative Partnership:

   • Team Inclusion: Involving the entire team in both problem and solution spaces, fostering a sense of ownership and collective responsibility.
   • Technical Collaboration: Partnering closely with tech leads and engineers to bridge the gap between business and technical perspectives.

3. Transparency and Fun:

   • Open Communication: Creating an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing ideas and feedback.
   • Gamification: Incorporating games and lighthearted activities to build rapport and make the work environment enjoyable.

4. Continuous Learning and Improvement:

   • Adaptability: Embracing feedback and continuously seeking to enhance their own skills and the team's processes.
   • Ownership: Instilling a sense of ownership within the team, encouraging members to take initiative and be curious about the product's performance.

Real-World Example: Chrissy recounts an instance where an engineer took the initiative to track and monitor product usage, reflecting a culture of ownership and curiosity that she strives to cultivate within her teams.

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Conclusion

Chrissy Fleming's insights provide a robust framework for both Product Owners and Scrum Masters to foster healthier, more effective Agile environments. By identifying and addressing anti-patterns, and embodying the characteristics of excellent POs, Agile teams can navigate the complexities of dynamic business landscapes while maintaining high morale and productivity.

Final Thoughts: Chrissy emphasizes the importance of community and continuous learning, encouraging Scrum Masters to support POs through mentorship and collaborative problem-solving. Her balanced approach of defending the team's integrity while advocating for meaningful, customer-centric product development serves as a valuable guide for Agile practitioners striving to elevate their craft.

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Connect with Chrissy Fleming

For those looking to delve deeper into Chrissy Fleming's methodologies or seeking personalized coaching, she can be reached through her website chrissyflaming.com or on LinkedIn.

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Remember: Enhancing your Agile practice is a continuous journey. Tune in to more episodes of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast for actionable advice, inspiring stories, and expert insights to advance your career as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.

Transcript

[Pasco Duarte]

Hi there, Pasco Duarte here, your host. I wanted to share a story with you. You know how sometimes Agile just feels like following another checklist when like processes and frameworks feel more important than what we are trying to achieve and sometimes even like handcuffs. I was talking to a customer of the Global Agile Summit and he used a term that kind of stuck in my he said, I have Agile fatigue. And I've heard that a lot from people since then. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be this way. So we started thinking and at the Global Agile Summit, which is happening this May, we're bringing together practitioners who've actually done that, who've broken free from this, you know, install the framework kind of mindset. We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action. We're talking real experiences, practical solutions, and of course, amazing insights from leaders like Gojkoacic, who will be one of the keynote speakers, and Jurgen Apelo, who will be one of the keynote speakers as well. If you're ready to leave the Agile fatigue behind, just join us in Dalit. The early birth tickets are now available@the globalagilesummit.com and mark your calendar. We will have workshops on May 18th, that's a Sunday. And then the conference itself will happen on May 19th and 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. So let's make Agile exciting again. And remember, go to agile globalagilesummit.com that is, and get your early birth ticket. Now it will only be available until early March, so grab it now. And now onto the episode.

[Unknown Host]

Hello everybody. Welcome to rtgi, our Friday episode this week with our product owner and Scrum master, Chrissy Fleming. Hey Chrissy, welcome back.

[Chrissy Fleming]

Thanks so much. Happy Friday everyone.

[Unknown Host]

So this is going to be a schizophrenic episode for you, I'm sure, because you're both a PO and a Scrum master. So let's dive right into it and.

[Pasco Duarte]

See how it goes.

[Unknown Host]

So first, of course we would like to hear from you a anti pattern, something that some product owners do that make them say, not be the best proctors they could be. And that's being polite, of course. So the worst PO anti pattern that you've witnessed in your career, Chrissy.

[Chrissy Fleming]

I think aside from being a raging egomaniac, I actually think the worst anti pattern for a PO is being a bad conduit of the leadership's volatility. I saw this so much. I did this so much in, in the startup scene. Right. Oftentimes you have just very volatile CEOs and leaders, and they come in one day and want something different than they wanted the next day. And the worst of us, and I include myself in this very much, especially my earlier days, would just say, well, this is what has to happen. And the very worst of us put the same pressure on the team that was put on us as individuals. So it needs to be done now, it needs to be done yesterday. You have to work faster, stay late, all of that, just passing that onto the team, it's really toxic.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. And when you think about that, like, of course, you know, it is toxic. It creates overwhelming pressure and stress sometimes. But of course, working as Scrum Masters, we need to be able to navigate these situations. We can't tell the po, hey, you're wrong, go back home, because that wouldn't be very constructive and might get you kicked out. So we need to be able to. To navigate this situation. So from your own PO experience, having been in that position, and also from your own Scrum Master experience, how do you think we could work with these POs and help them to understand the consequences? Maybe, like, how could we help them to overcome this anti pattern?

[Chrissy Fleming]

Absolutely. It's actually, I think, a real blessing when a PO that is in that position has you as a Scrum Master on their side. It can be a very lonely job sometimes because you are constantly representing the people who aren't in the room. And so having a Scrum Master that is looking out for the team and that can take the side that maybe the PO is secretly hoping that somebody can take is a real advantage. But I was in a situation, I was at Trade coffee. There's a PO whose team was just constantly in tornado mode because the CEO would come in and change everything all the time, and the PO got stuck as an order taker. And by that point, I was much, much more seasoned than I was in some of these stories. And. And that PO said to me, I noticed that the CEO doesn't talk to you the way that he talks to some of the rest of us. And some of that may have been my age or my maturity, but I think a lot of it was I learned how to handle these situations and not to take changes in someone's mood as a change in my destiny or the team's responsibility. So tactics I encouraged this person to help with was first, defend the sprint. Right. Okay. We have committed to this thing that we're building right now. We can start talking about what's going to happen next. Sprint like you don't get to come in and ruin everybody's day, but you can ruin the next sprint, right? So defending the sprint and really trying to, to cover the team for what? They're getting more context. When these requests come down, there's a lot of swirl and getting the person who's making the request to give you more context, give you more of an understanding. What is the business case? Why did you wake up today really needing this thing? Is it because you learned something about our business that really matters or is it because you had bad eggs for breakfast? Like, let's, let's understand what's going on here and being able to articulate the trade offs. If, if we do interrupt the team to do this, what, what is going to happen? What thing that you cared about yesterday are you now not going to get? Because I think a lot of times people think that they're just going to get all of it over time. Demonstrating the impact of churn on the team and showing, being able to show in metrics what happens when the team has churn versus when they're allowed to just finish a sprint properly. And if you do all of that and you're still in a tough spot, at least you did what you believed and the team will know it because you have all the context. You have the answers to those questions, right? This is the context for why we're doing it. This is the business problem. These are the trade offs that we are accepting and this is why. So those are all things that you can do.

[Unknown Host]

Those are all very actionable and very concrete. One of the things that came to my mind as you were describing this, is that we often think, or at least the PO stuck in that position often think that their job is to do what somebody else requests. Because for me, when like whether it is CEO or the head of sales or whatever comes to you and has a request as a po, our job is to understand the request, not to take it in. And you said it very clearly when you said that this P.O. that you were referring to got stuck as an order taker. And that in itself is an anti pattern that we as scrum masters should pay attention to. Because if a PO is not able to be clear about the why to explain the implication of what the team is doing, then they're probably not ready to be the PO for that particular item, whether it is a feature or an epic or a whole product. Right? Because it is the understanding of the business that gives a solid ability to make decisions for the pos.

[Chrissy Fleming]

I mean, I I think to say that, you know, they aren't the right PO for that. I think certainly it's fair to say they need to learn more and need to understand more. I think POs are very often put in impossible situations where they are getting unreasonable requests from the people who ultimately pay their salaries. And. And you do feel caught between. And that was. That was my story of failure way back earlier in the week, right? This. This feeling of being caught between loyalty to your team, loyalty to the leadership, and trying to pick who to please, which is an impossible situation because nobody's going to be happy with you. And it was very early in my career that I got feedback that said, you say no too much, and I've been trying to navigate.

[Unknown Host]

That's. That's a compliment as a po, by the way.

[Chrissy Fleming]

I mean. Well, I like to say I was a product manager raised by engineers because I learned product management while mostly working with engineers and not with other product people. So I tend to have loyalty for that logic of if you create churn, if you swirl the team, you're not going to get the results you want. But some leaders don't care. And sometimes you are in a position where you're in just a terrible position where you can't always stand up to them. And you do have to sometimes say, this is not the hill I die on today. Like, let's be honest, we're all building technology. Like, nobody should die for this, right?

[Unknown Host]

Okay, so that's absolutely true. But we can't, like spos, we can't nevertheless ignore that. You know, to decide not to die on that hill actually means that somebody else will.

[Chrissy Fleming]

Well, it means that certainly that things will not be as they should be, right? And then that's when you and the team have to calibrate your tolerance of nonsense. There's always going to be a certain amount of nonsense at work. I mean, we were talking yesterday about the fun nonsense, right? The silliness in the play. But there's. There's a darker nonsense at work, which is we do things that don't actually make sense for the business, don't actually make sense for the team. But it might be what the CEO wants, or it might be what the customer is demanding. Even though we know that the customer is not going to want that thing. We. We all have to have a certain amount of tolerance for that because it does exist. So that's what I think. The Scrum Master can be a really strong ally to the poor in helping navigate the team's nonsense. Tolerance. Hey, remember we had nonsense last sprint. Maybe this sprint. We can have a no nonsense sprint. Or like, you know, navigating that tolerance, I think, and setting an expectation with the PO to the team. Hey, I wish that you could always have a perfectly defended sprint with no churn and nothing coming up. But that's not reality either. So navigating that together as a partnership I think is going to be really key.

[Unknown Host]

As a partnership, Right, Batman Robin. That's the metaphor I always use. All right, so we talked about the anti pattern, but of course we now need to talk about great pos. So let's end this week on a high. Chrissy, share with us the best product owner you've ever seen. How did they work?

[Chrissy Fleming]

I can't say that. So I'm going to say I. Is it unfair to put myself in here? I'm not, of course not. But I feel like I've been picking on myself all week and I do want to acknowledge some of the things I do well. But first I'm going to say I have learned from some amazing product owners and product managers through my career and continue to learn from them. And if, if you can help your product owners connect. There are groups for women in product. There are product organizations having product managers especially tend to be very isolated and very siloed. And so I love that you all have this community here for Scrum Masters, if you can help your product owners. I've learned so much from my community, but I'm going to say I've learned from them what to do when I am at my best as a po. Since I've shared some of my stories of when I'm at my worst, here's what I do, right? I really get to understand the customer and I advocate for their needs. Like that. The. The. Or I'm terrible with names, but my, my poor colleague with the terrible process we talked about earlier this week, I learned what he needed. I get, I get my teams in the rooms, in interviews, going on site visits, really getting into the problems that our customers have and sharing that knowledge with them. I build an understanding of what I am and I'm not good at and I sometimes make it fun. I've even had like played games with my engineers. Like, it's a game where I'll try to answer somebody's technical question and it's a game called Is Courtesy Full of Shit. And it's like, you know, they have to say yes you are or no, you're not. But I like to play with what I am going to know very well and what I don't and be very clear. So I always partner very deeply with the tech lead and the engineers on my team. Deep partnership with anyone else on the team. So building that understanding and Jeff Patton's book, User Story Mapping is amazing for this as well, for bringing out everybody's understanding. And I involve the pro, the team in the problem space and the solution space. We've told a lot of stories about where I try to make it fun, but also for me, going back to that meaningful work, if the team really understand the problem and really get to sit in the problem with me and then be part of the solution, that's when I feel like I'm really doing it well. And the other I've seen other product owners that are just so great at being on the cutting edge of technology or so great at making the team feel cohesive. And everybody's got their own flavor. Mine always involves bets and games and silliness and candy and swearing, unfortunately. But I know I'm a success when we solve real problems and people are trying to dive into our team. And like when someone on my team, let's say we're launching something, and I remember a time when an engineer said, oh, I built a little, a little bit of code so that I could track, so that I could monitor this usage because I wanted to see how this thing we built did. And this was very early in my career before I was really good at being on top of my metrics. But. But I love that he had the ownership. He. He was so curious about how this thing we built together would perform. And so that's something I've tried to instill in all my teams. So when I'm doing well, when I'm doing it right, that's what it looks like.

[Pasco Duarte]

Absolutely.

[Unknown Host]

And a great description. Quite a great checklist for us to go through and work with the po. Maybe listen together to this episode again and talk about the insights that you got.

[Chrissy Fleming]

Love your po.

[Unknown Host]

Love your po. Indeed. Indeed. And leave a comment on LinkedIn for Chrissy Chrissy, we're getting close to the end. I imagine LinkedIn is one of the places where people can find you, but where else can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing?

[Chrissy Fleming]

So you can go to chrissyflaming.com and that's my website for for if anyone needs product coaching or help with your organization and bringing insights there. LinkedIn is also definitely the great place to find me.

[Pasco Duarte]

Absolutely.

[Unknown Host]

We'll put the link to all of those in the show notes Chris, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge, Vaska.

[Chrissy Fleming]

This has been so much fun. So thank you very much for having me.

[Pasco Duarte]

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