Kirill Golubev: The Challenges with Scaling and Product Ownership for a Growing Scrum Team

In the podcast episode, Kirill Golubev shares a story of a team he was working with, which had grown larger. As they grew larger, they added a second and a third product manager. However, this led to constant fighting for priorities among the product managers. What was worse, the product managers were organized around components, rather than features, which caused even more conflicts, and delays in delivery for the team.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of having only one Product Owner working on the backlog. In that situation, the team adopted the Nexus framework to scale their approach to Scrum and created three different teams for the three different components. This was not optimal, but helped to avoid the biggest PO anti-patterns.

Finally, Kirill emphasizes the importance of building agreements between teams and Product Owners to ensure a successful outcome. Overall, Kirill’s story highlights the challenges that can arise when a team grows too large and the importance of effective communication and collaboration between Product Owners, Scrum Master, and teams.

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Kirill Golubev

Kirill considers himself an Agile and common-sense apologist. He wants to see simple processes in place, when people self-organize and manage themselves without constant push from management.

You can link with Kirill Golubev on LinkedIn.

Pino Decandia: The Product Owner committee, a serious anti-pattern

The Great Product Owner: The perfect project, with the perfect PO

The Product Owner Pino describes was intimately familiar with the product, and the problem that needed to be solved with it. Because of this, the PO did not have to seek permission or confirmation from someone else before making decisions. The PO was empowered! Also critically, the PO was “the face” of all decisions with the client, which allowed him to protect the team from unnecessary pressure. As Pino describes it: “it was the perfect project”!

The Bad Product Owner: PO by committee, a serious anti-pattern

Instead of one Product Owner, this project had a committee of people who were assigned the overall PO role. However, in this case, the committee did not work to fulfill the PO role. The conflicting needs in that group of people led to decisions that took too long, and to the alienation of the team, who was not allowed to give input after a decision because the committee was not able to process the feedback.

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 Pino Decandia

Pino started in software development but realized he was more interested in people than code. With experience, Pino came to believe that people can change; they don’t resist change but offer their own vision, which needs to be met.

Secondly, needs drive behaviors. To provide help, we must allow them to be clearly expressed. To set the example, we need to be ready to be the first to state our needs.

And thirdly, that ideological battles are meaningless.

You can link with Pino Decandia on LinkedIn.

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This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
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This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
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This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
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