A big deal is made in the agile world of the phrase inspect and adapt, and that's as it should be.
Inspect and adopt are both important words, but they belong together.
There's no point inspecting if you don't go on to use what you learn to adapt.
And adapting without first inspect results in arbitrary changes.
Unfortunately, some product donors don' take advantages of all the opportunities they're given to inspect.
These product owners often disengage during sprints.
They might show up for a planning meeting and probably for the sprint review, but throughout the Sprint, they're as elusive as Bigfoot.
I've got some tips that will help you if your product owner is not engaged for peak agility.
Hi, I'm Mike Cohn, the author of three bestselling books on Agile and Scrum.
And today I want to help YOU and your Product Owner.
The first thing I suggest is speaking with your product owner about the importance of staying engaged throughout the sprint.
Point out that the team will benefit from feedback as they develop, that team members will have questions that need timely answers,
and that working together is the best way to ensure success.
Also note that I said to speak with your product owner about this.
Email and chat software are great.
They have their purposes.
But I think you'll be more persuasive if you actually speak to the product.
If you can't persuade the Product Owner to become more engaged throughout each sprint, here's an easy next thing to try.
Tell the Project Owner that they will be responsible for running the demo during the review.
I prefer to have various team members run the keyboard to show the new features each worked on.
But when faced with a disengaged Product Owner, I tell the Product owner to be the one with their hands on the Keyboard.
I sometimes go so far as to imply it's a Scrum rule that they give the demo.
It's not, of course.
But I've learned that if they know they'll have to demo the product at the review, they don't disengage as fully during the sprint.
They don' want to embarrass themselves, so they stay more in touch with the work and the team members during this sprint Product donors often disengaged
during sprints because they're busy.
If that busyness is self-made, we can sometimes help by showing the product owner how to be more effective or how delegate parts of the job.
But in other cases, the busy is real and cannot be removed.
If this is the case and your product is too busy to do the work, you may need a different product.
You probably won't be successful at making this change if you go to the product owner's boss and tell them you need someone different.
But you can often succeed in getting a new product donor if your convince the current product to support the idea.
I do that by telling the Product Owner that they're too busy for the job.
They'll nod along as I point out the obvious.
I then tell them that they should instead be the key stakeholder.
I tell him the Key Stakeholder is the person that the whole team, developers, Scrum Master, and product owner are focused on making happy.
The Key stakeholder has the right to get mad if the team doesn't build the features.
I often make it sound like this is an official Scrum or Agile role.
It's not, but you know what?
Maybe it should be.
When I tell the overly busy, disappearing product owner that they may instead be the key stakeholder, the idea almost always immediately resonates.
They see that they can delegate the product owner responsibilities to someone else, yet retain the right to insist the products contain certain features.
This is often enough to encourage them to delegate their job to somebody else or to support the organization in an effort to find someone.
And of course, we should be looking for someone who has time to fully be the Product Owner without disengaging during the sprint.
Have you worked with a product owner who is less engaged than you would like?
What did you do to correct this situation?
Please share your thoughts in the comments.
I read and value every comment.
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