The Great Product Owner: Customer Feedback Loops: Key to Building the Right Product, the Agile Way!
In this segment, Meena describes a great product owner who was very effective at product discovery. This PO paired hypothesis with metrics to ensure that what was being built was what the customer wanted. He focused on feedback loops, using customer interviews to learn about the flow and using that feedback to inform delivery decisions. The PO also involved the team in interpreting the numbers, which helped the team understand how to build the right thing.
The Bad Product Owner: Technical Leadership Challenges in Product Ownership, leaving the tech lead role behind
Meena shared a story about a product owner who transitioned from being a senior developer and was unable to let go of technical leadership. This resulted in the PO intimidating the team by providing specific solutions and telling them exactly what to do, creating an unhealthy dependency. Meena gave one-on-one feedback to the PO, and appealed to the PO’s human relations ability. She emphasizes the importance of coaching and giving feedback to the PO, and not just focusing on the rules.
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 Meena Venkataraman
Meena is an Agile & Lean coach who helps organizations and teams transition to Agile ways of working. She is passionate about the neuroscience behind team dynamics and is interested in organizational design and the application of Agile principles across different business domains. Meena enjoys speaking at conferences and is an avid learner.
This is a guest post by Marcus Hammarberg, author of Salvation: The Bungsu Story, How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company. (available on Amazon)
This is the third post on a series by Marcus Hammarberg about how metrics can help engage, motivate and ultimately push a team towards success! (See other blog posts in this series here)
When we first started to work with the Bungsu hospital they were in a devasting situation.
Fast forward 1,5 years and you would see a hospital that was making money every day.
In the end, we turned the hospital from a situation where only the director and her closest staff cared, to a situation where 100 people in the hospital were actively engaged in everyday improvements.
How is this possible? What kind of magic was applied?
How focusing on a single metric improved team performance
Now that we had a metric that mattered to everyone and this truly was the “talk of the hospital”, we experienced a wave of change.
Not surprisingly the first groups to engage was the people in charge of bringing more people to the hospital; the marketing team.
It turned out that making the “number of patients served”-metric visible throughout the hospital, was what was needed to get them activated. But when we did, the lid of their passion and creativity jar was blown off! We started to see real ownership in their behavior. As if The Bungsu was their very own hospital.
Before I knew it, I found myself in a workshop where the two ladies of the marketing department blurted out 25 ideas on how to get more patients. And 3 or 4 of them were really low hanging fruit that we could do the very next day. For example:
Go to the nearby clinics and advertise our availability for surgery and treatments that the clinics could not handle
Offer free transport from the big hospitals to our hospital for treatments that the big hospitals had a waiting list for
Suggest that our freelancing doctors would do all their surgery in our hospital
These were very simple changes that had been dragging on in decision-making boards. Now the decisions were quick to make – because the need and impact were clear to see.
Just a few days after we started to track “number of patients served per day” these actions brought the metric up to a whopping 133 patients served per day! Twice the normal number of patients and a level that has not been seen in a long time.
This taught me, in a very impactful way, how a single metric can transform the performance of a team. In this case, the marketing team.
Do you need the one metric that matters to engage your team? This booklet is for you!
This is a very actionable tool that you can you use today in your organisation to make your visualizations matter to everyone all the time.
The Bungsu Story is a fascinating account of a real-life crisis, and how Agile, Lean and Kanban saved the Hospital from bankruptcy! Twice! Get ready for the journey, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
This is a guest post by Marcus Hammarberg, author of Salvation: The Bungsu Story, How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company. (available on Amazon)
This is the second post on a series by Marcus Hammarberg about how metrics can help engage, motivate and ultimately push a team towards success!
When we first started to work with the Bungsu hospital they were in a devasting situation.
Fast forward 1,5 years and you would see a hospital that was making money every day.
In the end, we turned the hospital from a situation where only the director and her closest staff cared, to a situation where 100 people in the hospital were actively engaged in everyday improvements.
How is this possible? What kind of magic was applied?
This is a guest post by Marcus Hammarberg, author of Salvation: The Bungsu Story, How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company. (available on Amazon)
When we first started to work with the Bungsu hospital they were in a devasting situation. Their finances were at an all-time low after years of decline in patient visits. Their operational permit had not been renewed and they were operating on probation, the staff was disengaged and blasé … oh, and one more thing: the roof of the entire second floor had collapsed.
Still, to my great surprise, not many people were upset, engaged or even cared about the survival of the hospital.
Fast forward 1,5 years and you would see a hospital that was making money every day, had not only an operational permit but also got awards for their services, happy and engaged staff … oh yes, and they had a newly renovated roof.
We didn’t hire or fire a single person during this time – and all the work to save The Bungsu was done by the people in the hospital, I merely acted as a guide for new ways of working.
In the end, we turned the hospital from a situation where only the director and her closest staff cared, to a situation where 100 people in the hospital were actively engaged in everyday improvements.
How is this possible? What kind of magic was applied?
We soon realized that the scary state of the hospital’s finances was not only our number one priority but it was also too vague for the staff when expressed in numbers. Billions of rupiah in deficit didn’t mean a thing for the staff.
First of all, those numbers were unrelatable for the average employee, even if we broke it down per day. Saying “we need 18.000.000 rupias per day” to someone that earns 1.000.000 per month doesn’t spark engagement.
We need 18.000.000 rupias per day!
Secondly, and perhaps most important, the staff in the hospital was not interested in budgets, forecasts or financial plans. They worked with patients! We needed something more concrete and closer to their day-to-day reality.
Armed with those two realizations we started to track “the number of patients we served per day”. We hoped this concrete metric would engage the staff. The numbers of presented were truly awful; our financial target was 134 services sold per day and we were averaging on 60-70. Half of what we needed to be able to improve the financial situation!
our financial target was 134 services sold per day and we were averaging on 60-70. Half of what we needed to survive!
I was shocked but the reaction in the room was something very different. Indifferent, unfocused or the occasional shrug. Almost angry, I got up and added a new line, for the number of patients required to break-even; 120. In my upset mood I blurted out:
Below this line we lose money by having the hospital open and we may need to close it!
That got their attention. The jaws of the 70 people in the room dropped to the floor at once. We now had our one metric that matters and most importantly: everyone understood it.
In the next blog post, you will see how this metric, visualized and understandable not only helped us focus on what is important but also made us into a team.
Do you need the one metric that matters to engage your team? This booklet is for you!
This is a very actionable tool that you can you use today in your organisation to make your visualizations matter to everyone all the time.
The Bungsu Story is a fascinating account of a real-life crisis, and how Agile, Lean and Kanban saved the Hospital from bankruptcy! Twice! Get ready for the journey, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
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Down-to-earth, hard-earned Scrum Masters lessons and the Tips from the Trenches e-book table of contents, delivered by email
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
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
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
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
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Internal Conference
Checklist
Internal Conference
Checklist
Download a detailed How-To to help measure success for your team
Motivate your team with the right metrics, and the right way to visualize and track them. Marcus presents a detailed How-To document based on his experience at The Bungsu Hospital
Download a detailed How-To to help measure success for your team
Read about Visualization and
TRANSFORM
The way your team works
A moving story of how work at the Bungsu Hospital was transformed by a simple tool that you can use to help your team.
Read about Visualization and
TRANSFORM
The way your team works
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.
Meena is an Agile & Lean coach who helps organizations and teams transition to Agile ways of working. She is passionate about the neuroscience behind team dynamics and is interested in organizational design and the application of Agile principles across different business domains. Meena enjoys speaking at conferences and is an avid learner.
Marcus is the author of 
This is a guest post by Marcus Hammarberg, author of Salvation: The Bungsu Story, How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company. (