B (4:03)

Yeah, because delivery is no longer a problem. At least the speed of delivery. What is the problem? What I've seen teams probably share with, you know, with the quick delivery, but they struggle with something. That's the key. They struggle to explain why it matters to users or consumers or to the business itself.

A (4:34)

Yeah. And by that, by them, you mean the whole team, right? Like including the product owner?

B (4:39)

Yeah, yeah, the teams.

A (4:40)

So one exercise I did quite often in my product owner courses was that I would ask product owners to sit down for two minutes, so 120 seconds, and write down as many ideas as they already had that they knew their team would need to deliver for their product. So this is not about creating new ideas. This is just about recollecting some of those that have already been discussed. And invariably they would do that. They would spend the two minutes, and then I would ask, how long do you think it would take for your teams to deliver that? And, you know, the answers would vary between three months, nine months, a year, a year and a half, whatever. And then I would phrase this kind of realization, I would phrase it out loud, which is in two minutes, you can write down ideas that take six to 18 months to deliver by your team. So there's a huge imbalance between creating ideas and delivering ideas.

B (5:42)

Yeah.

A (5:43)

And what you're saying, if I get you right, is that now this imbalance is less because the speed of delivery can be increased with AI.

B (5:53)

Yeah, that's correct. You have a powerful tool.

A (5:56)

And what I.

B (5:58)

In the software development, what I'm thinking.

A (6:01)

What I'm thinking is that we are. We are stepping further into comfort zones. That's. That's how I see it. Right. Like, for example, in my exercise, the two minutes, Product owners writing ideas, that's their comfort zone. Right. Writing ideas is what they do. That's their comfort zone. In the development side, that comfort zone of the product owner caused an imbalance. And now we're looking at AI as a way to solve that imbalance. Right. Like the imbalance between the cost of generating ideas versus delivering ideas. What I'm thinking about from what you said is that there's another imbalance that we are not talking about, which is it's a lot faster to deliver, even when it's slow, than to deliver something that has a potential impact on the customer.

B (6:50)

Yeah. What is the value correct? What is the value correct? Because they are our. They are. And I think for everybody product. They are our metrics, the customer satisfaction, because they have the final, you know, the final, the final benefit.

A (7:12)

So are we then now addressing the imbalance that was always there and it's still there and now it's even bigger, which is that we can deliver a lot more, but we can't be right as often. Right? So let's say that we have a 5% success ratio with feature to adoption, right? Like we delivered 100 features, five get adopted by a significant amount of users. If we now deliver 1000 features, right, we can easily say, well then in that case, 50 features will land with the users. Yes, but now you have a product with 1000 features. How do you integrate that? And what I'm thinking is, might it be that we are just slowly speeding up the cycle and soon enough the bottleneck will be how do we even add anything to the product? It's not that we couldn't add, it's that we don't even know how to because the products become so complex and unwieldy.

B (8:16)

And the challenge, the challenge is helping teams to validate faster with or AI intervention, not just to deliver more, but to validate faster. And the clarity of value is the real constraint.

A (8:38)

How have you tackled that with your team so far, that clarity of value, that validation part?

B (8:46)

Well, the Scrum Master job is to maximize output, is to keep value visible when speed increases. So I used to joke with my peers, with my colleagues, and I say, lick from facilitating flow, we are going to protect kind of intent, which is the value. Or I used to say we are going to have a transition to what is the new role of a Scrum Master? And we are probably moving toward what I call strategic guardian of value chain.

A (9:37)

Value masters.

B (9:39)

Value masters. Why not?

A (9:41)

Well, so here's the issue. I totally see that. And I think it's an important dynamic change for us to acknowledge in our work. The issue that I have is, okay, but how do we integrate this with the product owner role? Because when you look at Scrum, at least as a framework, the product owner should be the voice of the customer, should be the representative of the business. Therefore, they should be the masters of what is value. Right?

B (10:10)

Yeah, the first, the first is the expectation to have this, you know, this input from, from product owner. But who said that? I mean, he's not the only owner of the value. You have a chain of value. You know the expression chain of thought. You have a chain of value and you have different roles, functional roles, operational roles that are coming in this chain of value. And they are contributing to have this value, a real value delivered to the final customer.

A (10:49)

So could it be that one way to tackle this, maybe even an experiment, would be to work with the product owner to. To build an approach like even pre refinement, just even in the ideation part of the product owner's role, where we would start bringing in signals of value. Like you used a term in the previous episode, testing reality. Right. Like we need to test reality. And testing reality in the role of the product owner is testing the value of their ideas. Right. And we have in. In Agile and Lean Startup, we have many tools and strategies we can use to test ideas before writing the code, because the ideas are not the bottleneck that we know the delivery with the help of AI is going to be less and less the bottleneck. So then we need to focus to what is real bottleneck, which is in this case, validated value delivered to the market. So could it be that we could establish an experiment around bringing in signals of value to the earlier work, the backlog work, before even the team gets.

B (12:01)

Involved incrementally, I would say it's what I call the clarity of value. And you have different iterations.

A (12:11)

Yeah, Maybe that's the cycle we need to build with the product owner. Right. Like this clarity of value cycle, where everything gets tested before it gets handed over to the team, but tested for value in this case.

B (12:25)

Yeah, as I mentioned, delivery. And you mentioned you made a beautiful example. You know, the delivery process, it's doubled, tripled, but the primary key word is not delivery anymore. It becomes value.

A (12:51)

I wonder how we might be able to establish this realization more widely in the community. I recorded a podcast for Christmas week where I talk about that. I talk about how do software organizations work not just towards value, but towards value and then towards adaptability, which is one of the core aspects of agility. And I think that we need to start talking about the terms that focus on that process of clarity of value. As you say, like Lean Startup brought us a lot of ideas, like experimentation as an example, which is, for example, what we are talking about right now, creating experiments. Right. And I think we need to start talking more in those terms. Like, what do you think about that change of language, that instead of delivery, which is the prevailing term these days, we talk about validating value.

B (13:50)

Yeah. And validating faster in the process. Not at the end.

A (13:59)

Absolutely.

B (13:59)

Yeah.

A (14:00)

Yeah. And that's a challenge. Well, thank you very much for sharing that challenge with us, Kristina. I think it is something that we as a community need to tackle it's probably going to take a while, but hey, we never started this because we thought it was easy.

B (14:14)

Let's start with the conversation is the first step and who knows. Thank you very much.

A (14:22)

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