Being the product owner for a Scrum team is a tough job.
There are a lot of competing demands for your time.
You need to keep stakeholders, customers, and users happy, all while being responsive to team members' questions about work in the current sprint.
Oh, you need ensure the team has a steady stream of new work for future sprints.
The job is hard and that means product owners are bound to make some mistakes.
Hi, I'm Mike Cohn and I am the author of three best-selling books on Agile and Scrum.
I help teams succeed with Agil.
In this video, i'm going to share seven mistakes you'll make as a product owner and what you can do about them.
Interrupting a sprint with new work is the first of seven mistake product owners commonly make.
Sprints are supposed to be protected time boxes.
As good product owners, we tell the team that what they work on will not change after a sprint has been planned.
But that's a hard promise to keep when customers and stakeholders change their minds or come up with new needs.
You'll be tempted to bring some of these changes into a sprint rather than waiting for the start of the next.
And you know what?
In some cases, that is okay.
Some changes are very important and worth interrupting a Sprint.
But many others are not, and you need to learn to reign in your temptation to interrupt a sprints with those.
An easy way to guard against these interruptions is to solicit the help of your scrub master.
Make sure they know it's okay to push back against you anytime you want to bring something new into a sprint.
Most scrub masters know they should do this, but sometimes they're afraid of pushing back.
Let them know, it is okay.
I learned to keep my tendency to interrupt in check by writing the new ideas somewhere.
Sometimes I put them in the team's backlog tool.
Other times I'd write an email and schedule it to send to myself the day before sprint planning so I remember to bring that new idea up.
Getting the idea out of your head is often enough.
The second common mistake product owners make is not attending scrum meetings.
While the Scrum Guide says it's not mandatory for product donors to attend daily scrumb meetings, the best productowners make every effort to participate
whenever possible.
If I had a way of identifying the, let's say, 100 best scrumm teams I've ever worked with, I guarantee their product owner participated in the daily scrums.
Similarly, some product owners don't attend sprint retrospectives, or just as bad, their teams don' invite them.
You are part of the overall Scrum team.
Your participation in these meetings demonstrates your openness to improve and encourages team members to also improve as well.
Many product donors make the third mistake, telling the team how to build whatever they've been asked to deliver.
As a product owner, your job is to tell the team what you need.
It's the developer's job to figure out how to fulfill your request.
Suppose your company plans to offer a pool table that will help players learn exactly where to aim.
You tell them that's what they want.
They decide the best way to do that.
Perhaps it's with a series of LED lights around the edge of the table.
Or perhaps it is a voice command saying left, left until the cue is aimed perfectly.
You can avoid telling a team how by considering each product backlog item or goal you give a Team.
For each, ask yourself if you've left the Team multiple ways in which they can fulfill the goal.
As a product owner, your job is defining products or solutions that make people happy.
You probably like saying yes to their requests, but many product owners do not say no often enough, which is the fourth of the common mistakes product
donors make.
For every request you say yes to, you are saying no to some other request.
This can be particularly bad because you're often saying No to a feature someone hasn't requested yet.
Customers, users, and others will continue to identify new needs.
If you've already committed the team's time, You are implicitly saying NO to unidentified requests.
Be careful in how far ahead you commit what a team will work on.
While I encourage not committing all of a team's time too far ahead, it is important for product owners to avoid mistake number five,
not prioritizing far enough ahead.
Going from sprint to sprint, always pursuing what is most important at the start of the sprint is suboptimizing.
Good product donors prevent this by setting slightly longer term product goals.
I recommend setting quarterly product goals.
A three-month horizon provides a good balance between a long-term goal and one that feels achievable.
Additionally, a three month goal is one against which a team can notice their progress.
A sixth mistake product owners make is taking on the job without the authority to do the work well.
When a product owner makes a decision that is later reversed, often by the product's owner's boss, team members quickly learn to think of all decisions
as tentative.
If you find yourself in this situation, you obviously need to have a conversation with your boss or whoever is overruling you.
To structure that conversation, prepare by writing various product owner responsibilities, each on its own sticky note.
You can also use any of the virtual whiteboarding products.
Write things like prioritize the backlog, determine release dates, provide feedback on implemented features, and so on.
then collaboratively separate the items into piles of yours, theirs, and shared.
Achieving this clarity of your responsibilities will often result in gaining more of the authority you need to fully succeed as a product owner.
The seventh and final mistake is not listening enough to feedback.
As a product owner, it's easy to get overly attached to your vision for whatever you're building.
You need instead to listen to customers, users, stakeholders, and yeah, your developers too.
you don't need to do everything any of them suggest.
Remember the mistake of not saying no often enough.
But good products become great when product owners listen the feedback, What other mistakes have you made or seen product owners make?
Let me know in the comments.
I read every comment and I plan to make new videos about some of the problems you mentioned.
This video is part of a three-part series.
Be sure to check out the seven mistakes Scrum Masters and Team makes by clicking the links.
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Thank you for watching, and i'll see you next time.