The Great Product Owner: Visual Facilitation and Dynamic Collaboration, The Secrets of a Remarkable Product Owner
In this episode, Amruta discusses a remarkable Product Owner who excels in her role thanks to her presence and rapport with the team members. The PO effectively facilitates the team using visual tools such as MURAL, encouraging participation and creating engaging visual information radiators. While the details of the solution are provided by the engineers, the PO skillfully asks questions that help them think of value-targeted solutions. Some of the PO’s superpowers include being recognized as a subject matter expert with excellent facilitation skills, and recognizing and leveraging the team’s capabilities, fostering a dynamic and productive environment. This Product Owner is also a proponent of liberating structures, ensuring that meetings remain interesting and enjoyable. Her strong rapport with the team contributes to her overall effectiveness in the role.
The Bad Product Owner: The role of the PO in motivating the Agile team
In this episode, Amruta emphasizes that Product Owners should focus on providing clear requirements that are valuable to customers and easy for the team to implement. However, some Product Owners tend to delve into solutions too early and second-guess the team, which leads to micro-management and disengaged engineers. The anti-patterns discussed include engineers disengaging from refinement meetings. Amruta provides tips such as helping the Product Owner realize their role is to present the “what” and leave the “how” to the team, training the Product Owner on their responsibilities, encouraging engagement with the process, and allowing for Q&A during refinement. The importance of understanding the engineers’ thought process is also highlighted.
The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a Scrum Master
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 Amruta Beri
Amruta is an Agile enthusiast, artist, and environmentalist. She loves quiz shows, travel and sports, and is an engineer at heart.
You can link with Amruta Beri on LinkedIn and connect with Amruta Beri on Twitter.
