How to Become a Better Scrum Product Owner

December 1, 2012

Earlier this year, I attended a Scrum Product Owner training course organized by Scrum Inc. in Boston. As you might know, OpenView has a long, productive relationship with Scrum Inc. — founder and CEO Jeff Sutherland is one of our Senior Advisors and he has worked with many of our portfolio companies since 2007.

2007 was also the start of OpenView’s commitment to implementing Scrum as an organization — across all teams and functions. I was first certified as a Scrum Master in 2008, and have been actively practicing Scrum ever since, having been a Scrum Master at OpenView and later on a Product Owner for the Research and Analytics Team.

Then, as now, we find that while there are a lot of challenges for us in adapting the Agile methodology to non-development work (at OpenView Labs, for example, we have a scrum team of recruiters, a scrum team of market research analysts, etc.), these challenges also allow us to learn Scrum in a new way. And they give us plenty of talking points when it comes to sharing Scrum war stories with other Scrum practitioners.

The two-day Scrum Product Owner training was a great refresher on the core principles of Scrum and how it applies to changing development practices and challenges.

I also walked away with a number of improvements for our own Scrum implementations. While these may not apply to all Scrum teams (because of our team’s unique characteristics) I hope they can be helpful for product owners who are looking to refresh their teams and infuse a fresh set of ideas to take their productivity to the next level.

Improve Your Process

  • Improve retrospectives by reviewing waste (I will highlight the seven types of waste in product development / project management in a subsequent post).
  • Get someone to own the list of impediments – this is essential to having a long term, serious process to identifying and resolving impediments.
  • Demo half way through. Or, in the case of a non-development Scrum, get early feedback, even before the first full version of any output.
  • Think about optimizing inputs so less time is wasted on clarifying inputs and re-estimating stories.

Grow Your Team Professionally

  • Improve communication skills for all team members.
  • Build a team manifesto so the team can have a set of core values and vision that brings its member together.
  • Identify potential for cross training and skill cross-fertilization, so the team becomes more evenly skilled.
  • Think of each impediment as an opportunity for learning. That will help encourage a positive attitude towards impediment identification and removal.

Be Smarter with Your Project/Release Planning

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  • Increase flexibility by planning to fill only 70% of capacity of each sprint.
  • Have regular, disciplined backlog grooming so that the backlog does not go stale/obsolete.
  • Spend more time on planning and describing acceptance tests, so the product built is closer to what is planned, and what is planned for each sprint is more realistic.
  • Do proper release planning.

Take Responsibility to Narrow Your Team’s Focus

  • Think about the Pareto rule – 80% of the needs can be addressed by 20% of the work. Therefore, your team’s focus should always be on solving 80% of the requirements/needs with the first 20% of their effort.
  • Reject projects you do not see as having real impact. They will only rot your backlog, demoralize your team, and burn you out
  • Focus on completing tasks before taking on new projects. This is similar to being very disciplined about backlog grooming, but it takes an even longer-term view.
  • Be prepared to slow down to catch-up with technical debt, because technical debt will ultimately hurt the team’s ability to focus.

Measure the Right Metrics

  • Measure time-to-market as the true measure of project completion and your team’s effectiveness.
  • Focus less on individual team member efficiency and emphasize overall project process efficiency, instead. That is a measure of how concentrated a team’s effort is on a given project over the duration of the project.

For more Scrum related resources, check out our Scrum Process and Resource Guide, one of our videos series with Jeff Sutherland, and Scrum Inc.’s Scrum Lab Q&A website.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.