Does your team have an overarching goal for its work—a product vision? Too many teams do not. The whole point of a project is to deliver a useful product that satisfies its customers. I like to think about projects as a container of some product value. That means that a given release does not need […]
Product owners have many challenges: They need to keep at least two thoughts about the product: what it needs to be in the near future, and what the organization wants it to be in the (distant) future. Some product owners think they’re supposed to fill out a complete backlog, including all the UI designs for
In How Product Goals Make it Easier to Create Sprint Goals and Reduce Feature Factories, Part 1, I started responding to Tom’s interview question. Now that we’ve dealt with the feature factory problem, it’s time to address planning time. Here’s the question again: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal,
A colleague, Tom, told me about this question he received in an interview: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal. What should the Scrum Master
I’ve led various project kickoffs over the years. Back in the closer-to-waterfall days, we had to introduce ourselves to each other. We could then move to the project purpose and release criteria. Now that agile teams stay together, we can change the kickoff to more project-specific work. I wrote an article several years ago, Keys
When you’re a project manager for a traditional project, it’s easy to write a project charter. You can sit in your office and write it alone, if necessary. You don’t have to involve the team. On an agile project, is that the right thing to do? Should you even use the same template? Agile projects
If you’ve ever planned a project, you know how hard the initial planning can be. There’s a reason we call the start of the project the “fuzzy front end.” Some project managers give up on the planning altogether and dive into details hoping that a plan will evolve. Looking Ahead It’s possible to generate a
Don’t depend on a work breakdown structure to keep your project on target: Write it out to help managers, team members and stakeholders find consensus. “I can’t get senior management to agree on what I think the project is supposed to do,” a project manager recently complained. “The developers don’t believe me when I tell