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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
The Product Owner Role in Construction—Voice of the Customer Across Every Phase | Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
00:18:31
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- [00:04]
A
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- [01:12]
B
Hello everybody. Welcome to our product owner and DGIF episode. This week we're talking about Agile in Construction with Felipe Engineer Manriquez. Hey Felipe, welcome back.
- [01:23]
C
Hey Vasco. It's good to be back.
- [01:25]
B
Absolutely. So product owner, right? Like that's not the kind of role we would imagine in a construction project. But of course when you're adopting Agile in construction, it's something we need to look at. So what have you learned about applying the idea, the concept of the product or role in construction?
- [01:44]
C
Yeah, and this is a role that in, in the construction space. I remember my first interaction with Jeff Sutherland. He told everybody, tear up your business cards. There are only three roles that exist. Developer, Scrum Master and Product owner. And nobody in there. People, I mean people fight for their titles. And he doesn't do now Jeff doesn't do that anymore. But that the roles are very misunderstood. I think developer is super intuitive. Scrum Master people can just equate to servant leader. But product owner in construction is like I'm speaking a foreign language because we have project managers and people often will misunderstand and think like, oh, the PM is definitely the product owner. And so in construction I tell people of all the people on the team, one of you really can bring the voice of the customer to these meetings. In our interactions, who is that person? On some projects it's the superintendent who actually brings the voice of the customer to the team. On other projects it could be a project executive. And it's rare. It's not as common as people think. Sometimes it is actually the pm. It's the project Manager will bring, will be the voice of the, will bring the voice of the customer and is having the interaction. So if you look at what the, what the PO does, that's how I decide who should act as the po. And if nobody on the team is doing that, I will take that role on myself until I can groom somebody to take that. And that's one of the responsibilities of a Scrum Master that I think is. It's underutilized, it's under said. Like in the scrum training Vasco. I think it's like a single bullet point on like 400 slides. There's one bullet point that says Scrum master helped the PO act in their role. Because a lot of organizations have a very weak product owner function and they don't bring in the voice of the customer because of the hierarchies that many of our organizations have. And construction is like stupid hierarchy. Like it's, it's, it's or charts to kill you with. Like, like I don't think a lot of people don't realize like that comes from the military. And I studied a lot of military books, especially like Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership. He was a Navy SEAL, Special Forces and then General McChrystal's team of teams. And what I found in both of those books and in both of those leaders experiences, I found a strong product owner culture that they were making and both of them to make those changes was it was counterculture because people over rely on the hierarchy to do the things right. But as you get down to the cell level of where you have a team, somebody has to bring the voice of the customer to the team. So like a construction projects, if I'm working with a, let's say a metal framing company that metal gets attached to by a downstream trade. So in that, in that company somebody is going to interact with the people that receive that frame metal building. And it's most often mechanical, electrical, plumbing, contractors that have to attach to that stuff to the skeleton of the building. And so that metal company is actually acting as a product owner for the downstream trades. And so it changes in the different phases of construction because every day in construction is like a brand new day. No, it's not. The changes are so dramatic because the building is physically taking shape in a reality. And as you get to these different phases, the product owner function has changed. But on a, on a management team, I'll stay with that for now. They're the person that is responsible for what the team actually does. And that is always somebody and it depends on the phase on the company.
- [05:19]
B
How do you bring, like, especially in that context, and also the fact that the PO role, location, let's call it, that is changing throughout the project. How do you go about applying these ideas from the product owner role, which is the selection and prioritization of work?
- [05:35]
C
Yeah, and that's where I tell them I want. I said, we don't want to guess what the customer absolutely wants. So in construction, we're lucky because we, because of all the legislation, requirements and the laws, we can only build what we actually have designs to do. Which some of you that are in product development don't have that luxury of having the requirements totally concrete. But in our industry, if there's not a line on the page, you don't get the wall. If there's not a, you know, if there's not a detail for this, how these things come together, we have contractually to ask the question in writing to get the answer. And so I work with teams to really bring the voice of what is in the best interest of the owner. So let's assume we'll take a PM example for now. So if the PM is communicating with the client downstream and knows the drawings, that's the person I'll focus on and coach up as the product owner. And I'll tell them, I want you to think like the owner and bring that to the team meetings. Because we can't have the owner in the meetings with us. So the PO is the person that can embody the ultimate client or the, or the group receiving the work. In this phase, that's happening because it can move. But on the management teams, it can often be an executive or a PM will act on that PO role. On some tenant improvement projects, those are the examples most often where I see as a superintendent, because they're interfacing with the client all the time. Like if we're working in an existing hospital, the superintendent is interfacing with the charge nurses, the heads of the doctors, the specialty, different people in the different departments. They're, they're every day in the working area in the working hospital. So they, they have the voice of the customer where the project manager doesn't, because they're, they have other project management duties. So in those two examples, I just find who it is, and then I coach them up on bringing that voice of the customer to every interaction we have as a team. And so I just teach them. And it doesn't take long to teach. And I said, like, we weren't with you when the nurses Said this was important for, you know, this week. So tell us in your own words, what does that mean? And then they bring that to the team and it totally transforms how we prioritize and make decisions as a group. And it, it becomes more of a working together and a more natural alignment because people want to do well for the owners of the projects we do naturally, people want to do well like this. People are naturally very good, Vasco. And so that prioritization gets a lot easier when they speak in terms of what the customer wants and what's important to the customer, rather than saying keeping it secret and just, well, no, Felipe, this is not the number two thing you're going to do next. You're going to do the number seven thing first and never tell you why. That's what happens before when that prioritization muscle is weak, when they can't speak from the customer's perspective.
- [08:17]
B
So of course, being able to speak from the customer's perspective is one of the core advantages that the proctor role brings to the whole process, to the whole system. One of the things we find very hard to do on the IT side is to have that person or those people who speak from the customer's perspective to actually have a very clear vision and understanding and even ways of measuring what value is. Because it's not enough to know who the customer is and even perhaps having an insight into what they value, you need to be able to translate that into minute, day to day decisions. So how do you help these people ensure that the value is delivered by not just that the prioritization happens, but that value is delivered across the different phases of the project.
- [09:05]
C
Yeah, so this is the teaching moment here, Vasco, like where I actually have to teach vocabulary. So the word value is totally misunderstood by it's. Value is like one of those words that everyone thinks that they know what it means, but they really don't. And so I tell people, like, I just say, like, hey, just so we're all on the same page, when I use the word value, this is what I mean. Value is a beneficial transformation of materials, information, or a combination of both. And that's actually an industrial engineering definition of value. And I said, now that we have that definition in place, let's not do things that don't transform information or materials or in combination. And so now we're looking at wasteful things. And because a lot of times people will make noise and this is. And like a lot of, a lot of owners do this and I'm even sitting up in my chair Right now because I have an owner on a 100 mil million dollar project that likes to make decisions from their gut feel based on who knows what. And almost always it's not well thought out. It's good intentioned but not well thought out. And that spins the team to do things that don't add value because something happened on a project, the last project they did, something bad happened. And so they introduce a bunch of work for the team to do that has that the conditions for when that bad thing happened aren't even true anymore. And so the team wastes their time doing things that do not change information, do not change materials, do not add value. And so we have to teach the people to recognize what current conditions are we facing. So when the owner says this thing that he always says and it happens like every week, we have to know like is that are those conditions true for us and what changes do we need to make so that we can impact the materials that we're putting in place or the information processing? It's not just passing information. So I want to make it super clear to people that giving a status of where things are is waste. A status of where things are is waste. You want things to radiate information so that people change their behavior so that that's where you're having an information process change. Like in construction, like we do these long big schedule states and then we have the ability to replan and change processes so that we get better outcomes, which is like reliably putting work in place because that's what we only get paid for the work we put in place. We don't get paid for any other thing. And so that's where we gotta, that's focusing on that prioritization for the right process and not doing things too early. So I'm super sensitive when prioritization people say like, well we need a. This h. This happened this week. This week. Somebody said though the floors are available, people should start doing survey and layout now. And I, I had to stand up and I said timeout. Yes, it's true that you can physically be on the floor on this new building, but there's no concrete yet. And so where are you going to put the layout? Because once we're on metal decking, once we put the concrete now we've, we've moved up five inches and any kind of markings you did on metal decking 5 inches down vanish. Once you put 5 inches of concrete on something, you bury it and so like you're going to lose the layout and there's only so many columns. So if everybody tries to put layout on the columns, like, it just becomes like graffiti and gibberish. I said, it's not time. I was like, I love that you want to start doing this now, but now is not the right time. Right now we need to focus on these things that are going to get us to doing the good layout that'll get us to this part. And we just sometimes have to expose what's coming downstream so that the, the product owner, or in this case, the owner, the actual owner who's meddling with good intentions can see that the things that they're concerned about are going to happen and there are actually planned. So in Scrum speak, like, I want to show my, my product owner a vertical column backlog of the things that they say. And I say, okay, the thing that you're introducing, I'm using my hand, like up here is like the top number one as I move down away from number one, like, where should I zipper it in? And so I let them, like, you could change whatever you want, but where do we put it in where it's going to have the most impact? It's going to transform materials we're putting in place or the information so we can put materials in place faster for all. For us, in construction, it's always real life, physical, tangible things every time. Not ideas. Ideas is what we use to make the physical, tangible things real. That's where we get paid, assembling physical, tangible things. So over emphasis on materials. So for prioritization, it's all about getting the right materials in place one time that we don't touch twice.
- [13:53]
B
Yeah. And at the right time. Right, like right time, not before. Like the markings on a. On a structure that is going to be covered by concrete.
- [14:00]
C
Exactly. It's so intuitive. Once you say it out loud. It sounds really good in your accent.
- [14:07]
B
Too, when you say it out loud. I can. That's the key. When you say it out loud. Felipe, it's been a pleasure. It's been a blast this week learning from you about agile and leaning construction. We're about to close, but before we do, where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing?
- [14:25]
C
Yeah, so the easiest place to find me is on my website, TheFilipe Bio Link. TheFilipe Bio Link has all of my social media there. And I have a podcast, the EBFC show. If you just Google my name, you're going to find like 17 terabytes of stuff because I post on LinkedIn multiple times a day. So it's not the always the best way. But at the Felipe bio link you can actually get my phone number. You can call and text me and people do call and text me, Vasco, they actually do. It happens occasionally and I love to talk to people about different things. But the place where you want to get the most engagement with me today is my brand new EBFC Scrum community of practice where people working to create these changes with Lean and Agile in construction can come together with other like minded people. We have now a community growing to we're approaching a thousand members and I just love this community. I had a session earlier today, we're playing Scrum Jeopardy with my AI agent live. That was so much fun that we're doing a replay this week. So find that on my socials. I'm on YouTube, I'm on TikTok and I'm barely on X nowadays, Bosco. So I'm going to have to catch.
- [15:42]
B
The LinkedIn and the other websites links in the show notes. So everybody check it out and reach out to Felipe and if you have questions, follow up, just go ahead and reach out. Also check out the other Agile in Construction episodes we have on the podcast. The link will also be on the show notes. Felipe, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.
- [16:08]
C
Yeah, thank you Vasco. This has been amazing.
- [16:15]
A
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- [18:05]
C
Slack.
- [18:07]
B
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