← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
When Product Owners Facilitate Vision Instead of Owning It | Alidad Hamidi
00:15:14
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- [00:04]
A
Hey there agile adventurer. Just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello everybody. Welcome to our Friday episode. TGIF and product owner of course, this week with Ali Dad Hamidi. Hey Alidad. Welcome back.
- [01:21]
B
Hey, Happy Friday.
- [01:23]
A
Happy Friday everybody. And Proctor is always a cool topic to have on a Friday because we're more in a relaxed atmosphere, maybe a little more reflective and open to tackling potentially unresolvable topics. Because it's weekend coming so it doesn't matter, right? We have to. We can wait until Monday to come back to it. Okay, so let's dive into it. We'll talk about great product owners in a minute. But first share with us Alidad. Potentially the worst product owner anti pattern you've witnessed in your career.
- [01:57]
B
I wouldn't say it's the worst. I'll tell you the story but before I tell that I think there is of some of my earlier works was when I talk about the 2 dysfunction of the 3D functions of scrum. I said Scrum is a good framework but it's got 3D function, it's got the product owner as a rule, Scrum Master as a rule, and the backlog. But if you remove these three from a scrub it's very useful for certain contexts. But with this tree it becomes dysfunctional. But I don't mean it literally. So there is. I probably have to deep dive into what does it mean, but I won't go into that because that's open up a whole different conversation. I would specifically answer your question, but if you're interested we can explore that other 3D functions later. I wouldn't say the worst, but one of the early days of My career, I had a product owner who was new in the organization and a technical person. Because he was new, he naturally, he was just being human. By the way, it took me a long time to realize that. Initially I hated that person, but I kind of learned later that, well, he was just being human and he didn't have the right support and the environment for it. So it was a technical person joined as a team. It was a clinical. It was a team who was developing a clinical solution for clinicians. And because he was new, he naturally leaned into his strength, which was technical. So every day he was spending whole heaps of time with the team, working with them, which is not a bad thing. Product owner is also a team member. Right. So going into the details, how everything should look like giving team solutions, not because he was a bad person. I keep telling him, mate, you need to spend more time with our stakeholder. You need to understand their perspective. And result of that was team keep working on stuff. They created value, they delivered it. And some of it halfway through, suddenly product owner come in and say, oh, we really don't need that. Or we delivered it and no one used it, which was even worse. So he completely lose track of his job is to understand, not only understand the environment, understand the stakeholder, their needs and look at the trend and kind of come up with that view, but also put the people in front of that environment. He did the opposite, just creating barriers after barriers between the team and the environment. And he wasn't also participating with, with our stakeholders and our customers. So that was one of the kind of really, really, it created really bad dynamics.
- [04:51]
A
Imagine you would see a product owner like this again in a future assignment. Like, what do you think are certain things we could bring to the conversation that would potentially help this product owner understand that even though they are leaning into their strengths and just being human, their effort is being put in a place that doesn't really have a lot of leverage.
- [05:12]
B
Yeah, I think, look, sometimes people have to learn. I wouldn't necessarily say if you see someone is falling into a hole, just let them fall, or if it's a cliff, I'll stop them, but if it's a tiny hole, I'll let them fall in. And sometimes people have to learn, but people will only learn if they reflect on it and if they see. So I think number one is when there is a small failure, we will have a reflection on it and then start exploring. Look, you know, here, here is a situation. You have a team who can create really good solutions, but we also need to understand the problems that we need to solve really well. So I would facilitate, I would encourage to facilitate some stakeholder type forum, whether it's the, in a strong, whether it's Sprint review or whether it's some prioritization session with the stakeholders where they actually see what the team is working on. And I want the stakeholders and customer to say that, oh, but that's not what we want. And once the person, the product owner become aware of it and become said about it, then that's the moment. That's a coaching moment. That's one of the things I would use.
- [06:28]
A
Yeah, I think that's a great example of the need for people to do the reflection on their own. Right. Like if we bring to them the solution, it's not them figuring out what it means and how it is important but if we help them, once they get the feedback like okay, what could we have done differently? Right. So we become kind of catalysts of that reflection, then there's an opportunity for that person to actually get into the learning themselves and therefore that has a lot more power. So. And how about great product owners though? Alidad? Because of course not only bad product owners exist, also great ones exist. So talk to us about the best product owner you've ever worked with. How did they work?
- [07:14]
B
There is an irony there. The best product owner I work with was not a product owner but a project manager and she didn't realize that she's acting as a product owner. So I was working with a client and I was brought in to help them adopt agility. So there was this strategy project they were running and they asked me can you help them deliver faster? Or something like that. So I went there and the first thing I realized is the team was confused about there wasn't enough alignment about what is it that we are working on or what's the value that we are creating. Look how we run our inception. We invite bunch of our stakeholders and marketing and operation and advisors and the team together and then we'll just make sure that everyone is aligned with the vision. How are we going to deliver? What's the score, what's the timeline? All the typical things you do in an inception workshop. 20 minutes into inception I start asking this question. I said, well how do we know the customer have this problem and they're going to pay for it if you give them this solution? And no one knew that and this project manager to her credit, jump in and say what do we need to do? I said, well it's very simple. Let's Just run an assumption mapping. We understand the assumptions that need to be true for our solution to actually bear and then we'll take it from there immediately. Two days after that we had our assumption mapping. This entire team was there. A stakeholder, was there. She didn't become a proxy. She didn't say, oh, okay, I'm going to go and find out, I'll come back to you. So all right, cool. Let's just holding come together our stakeholders representative come, we run the session. And the result of that was they were going to spend a couple of million dollars integrating with some external vendor. They realized that there's huge risk. Number two is customers actually don't want that. Instead of that, they ended up simply developing some educational module and some scripts for the customer support and the advisors. But the beauty of that was.
- [09:33]
A
He.
- [09:33]
B
Didn'T come and say this is the vision, this is what we're given, this is the budget and we have to develop it. She said, oh, we need to pivot. And then there was a team that they sat with the advisor, they listened to the customer calls. It wasn't about, I hear it a lot. I said, oh great. Product owners have a vision for the product and have a roadmap. We need to have a vision and we need to have a roadmap. By the way, both of them have to be adaptive and shift. But it's not the product owner that need to have that. The product owner can facilitate creation of that. And it's not just product owner or a team, it's the broader stakeholder and customer community that need to co create that. But that was one of the best examples of a product owner I've seen that she wasn't actually a product owner. And you know what happened after going through that and I was kind of helping them to come up with the discovery practices. She took that in and went across the entire organization and started to teach everyone how to do discovery and completely transform the product development paradigm in that organization. One person.
- [10:48]
A
Absolutely great stuff and a great story that really the product owner is more than a role, it's also a mindset, right? Like it's this being open to discovering, it's accepting that we need to do that discovery and then reacting to it. Ali dad, we're close to the end, but before we go, where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing?
- [11:09]
B
If you want to find me personally, you can look me up in LinkedIn. Ali Amedi. Easy to find, but if you want to find more about what we do. I'm a co founder of a company called Desirable Futures. Our website is desirablefutures group. I have two partners, David Nee and Ross McIntyre. I hope you get a chance to invite them to the to your podcast as well. Both Russ and Dave, amazing folks and we are into org design for autonomy and AI and our practice is very human centric I think and this is the paradox of our vision. Although we talk about org design for autonomy and AI but ultimately I think at the core we are human centric organization. We're helping organizations to become human centric. We do a lot of work with people, different paradigms like we work with Haier Research center for hire looking at their operating model. We work with Semco Style Management Institute and and bunch of others effectively. If you want to organize for self managing team at a scale you can reach out to us.
- [12:32]
A
Absolutely. And we'll put the link to LinkedIn and also desirable Futures Group website on the show Notes Alidad hey, thank you very much. It's been such a pleasure to have this conversation. Thank you for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.
- [12:47]
B
No worries. Let's go. I really enjoy each other and thanks for creating this space for learning.
- [12:56]
A
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