Agile Otter Blog

I was chatting with a manager who was once a PO on a team I coached many years ago. This is only my best memory of the conversation (I didn't record it at the time). I may have slightly embellished it with snippets from conversations that followed over the course of days or weeks, but I try to be faithful. One day she took me aside and asked what she should be doing to accelerate the team and get more work pushed through. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing? But I thought that I’m supposed to be getting maximum work and speeding up the team…?” “Nope. Your job as PO is to maximize the value of the work, not the quantity of the work. Given that they’re doing roughly the same amount of work each week (barring emergencies and vacations), your job is to make sure that what they are working on is the most valuable work that they could do that week - that it is impactful and useful.” The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Te...

Including delivery/deployment in the definition of done I'm told is unfair because teams aren't in control of what gets delivered or when. "Their work might be completed, but be only a fraction of some larger scatter-gathered effort, so it's not their fault." "They may be dependent on work from another group, say FE or BE or database, or something, so it's not their fault the work isn't done." "They may have worked on a dozen things, but only one was delivered. It's unfair that it doesn't represent all of their efforts." "Releases aren't done every sprint/increment/week/whatever, so it will look like uneven velocity if we only count work actually delivered." "They should be able to count the points for everything they worked on, whether it's delivered or not." "A manager may decide not to release their feature and leave it in the branch -- maybe never release it. It's not their fault so...