Agile product leaders (product managers, product owners, and business analysts) all have one goal: How do I support the team in their quest to deliver better and faster? Product leaders do this by helping the team plan with minimums, and continually replan. These two workshops help you do that. I offer two versions: for teams, […]
If you’ve been paying attention to agile at all, you’ve heard these terms: pairing and swarming. But what do they mean? What’s the difference? When you pair, two people work together to finish a piece of work. Traditionally, two developers paired. The “driver” wrote the piece of work. The other person, the “navigator,” observed the
You might have noticed I’ve slowed my blogging in the past few weeks. I’m fine. I’ve been a product owner/customer for our new-to-us house remodel. In the last several weeks, almost every single day, Mark and I have taken some time to go over to the new house to see the progress and provide feedback
I keep hearing a lot about “chief” this and “chief” that when it comes to Big Agile, aka program management. You know, chief product owner, chief architect, that kind of thing. I’m kind of puzzled. I thought agile was all about self organization and no command-and-control. Chief anything reeks of command-and-control to me. At the
Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other
Developing and Nurturing Respect in Geographically Distributed Teams Joseph, a tester, was reading an email from a developer in Germany. He exploded out of his chair, and ran to the product owner. “Those people have no respect for us! How can they ask us to do this?? Don’t they realize what they are asking for?
In my post, When You Have No Product Owner at All, I said That’s because agile needs a responsible person who is not part of the cross-functional technical team to rank the backlog so the team knows the order of the work. Without that person, the team does not know what to do. I’ve had
What happens when you have no product owner at all? How does a team know what features to develop in what order? Several teams I know encountered this. They all had product managers. Most of them had Business Analysts. All of them had a technical manager who was willing to be their product owner, but
I recently spoke with a colleague who’s a little confused. John was just promoted to being the development manager in a small organization. He’s used to doing lots of work—whatever needs to be done, he does. Now, he’s managing 6 developers in an organization that’s trying to move to agile. No, they haven’t had any
I’ve been working with and discussing agile program management with a bunch of people. One of the big issues is: what do we call certain people at the program level? We need a program manager, someone who sets/explains the program’s vision, develops program-wide release criteria with sponsors, has a way to articulate program status, someone