Helping Agile teams when the Product Owners are absent | Usman Kotwal
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In this project, some new Product Owners were appointed. However, the PO’s wanted to have their own teams. Working with a consulting company, they set the new teams up for the project, however, and based on experience, the consulting company organized for each team to have a “shadow PO”. Over time, it became clear that the buyer-side Product Owners were very much “hands-off”, and the teams were discouraged from talking directly to the stakeholders, which led to trouble because they started missing information they could not get any other way.
In this episode, we explore this anti-pattern in a team, and what we can do - as Scrum Masters - to combat the potential consequences.
Featured Book of the Week: Empowered by Marty Cagan et al.
In Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan et al, Usman learned about how to help teams move towards the focus on outcomes, and own the decision making in the product development process. The book shares tips on how to help product teams, also from the perspective of a manager or Scrum Master.
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Usman Kotwal
Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.
You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.