Sprint Goals are a tool for the PO to communicate with the team and Stakeholders. However, not all PO’s know how to use them, or even try. When PO’s aren’t able to communicate the value to the team and stakeholders, then bad things can happen as we learn in this week’s PO anti-pattern segment.
The Great Product Owner: Using Sprint Goals as a way to collaborate and communicate with Stakeholders
Sprint goals are a tool that helps teams focus and make decisions, however, those goals don’t create themselves. A great Product Owner is able to prepare those Sprint Goals in a way that speaks to the team. In This segment, we refer to a technique by a PO that brought several possible goals to the Sprint Review, and asked the stakeholders to help them choose the right goal for the Sprint.
In this segment, we also refer to Martin Dalmijn’s work (Martin has been a guest here on the podcast).
The Bad Product Owner: Value delivery as the focus for Product Owners
This segment starts with a sad story, that of a PO that was fired after 9 months of work with their team. The reason: they had no way to show the value of what the team had delivered in those 9 months. A critical responsibility for a Product Owner.
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Mark Metze
Following the pattern of all good Computer Science majors, Mark began his career as a programmer and devoted the first 2 decades of his career to the craft of writing code. His next decade was spent in a managerial role for a software team. And then recently he pivoted once again to the role of Scrum Master. Mark has a heart for leading through service and has enthusiastically embraced the role of Scrum Master.
You can link with Mark Metze on LinkedIn.
