product owner safari
DESCRIPTION
Presentation from Agile and Beyond conference, Dearborn, Michigan, March 2012TRANSCRIPT
Product Owner SafariEnterprise Product OwnershipElena Yatzeck [email protected] +1 773 573-7114March 10, 2012
Target Participants
Inquiring enterprise employees looking for how agile might apply in their environment
Practicing small-team agilists interested in what enterprise agile looks like
Practicing enterprise agilists looking for new perspectives
Disclaimer
90 minutes is not enough time to actually plan your organization’s product owner strategy.
Intention is to provide an outline and thought experiment to get you started at home.
Why “Safari”?
A safari is “a journey or expedition, for hunting, exploration, or investigation, especially in eastern Africa”
A corporation is a complex terrain worth exploring
Agile transformation is a journey Elephant Driver Path
Big Game Hunting: What You Take Home
Experience: simulation of an entire enterprise agile project lifecycle
Validation: for those of you who are tired of people saying “That’s NOT AGILE” when you describe what you do at your large company.
Knowledge: 12 handy take-away concepts (in the appendix)
Itinerary
Product Ownership and the Business Case
Product Ownership and Project Initiation
Product Ownership Among the Details
Product Ownership at Delivery Time and Beyond
Product Ownership and the Business Case
Input: Situation Market opportunity Stakeholders Team
Output: Spider Web Lite Charter Product Owner Team Design
Input: The Situation - 1
You work for a financial services company.
The company is launching a mobile application to interface with an existing corporate travel/expense management system. In two quarters.
Your team isn’t the mobile app team. You’re in charge of the infrastructure changes to the “Reimbursement-Direct Pay” functions that will need to be made to support the mobile app.
Input: The Situation – 2
Here are your stakeholders
Input: The Situation – 3
Here is your team
Name Role Skills Connections
Jen Fremont Business-side project manager
Organized and detail-oriented.
15 year veteran of 10 mergers. Knows all survivors.
Norman Dwyer IT-side project manager Knows the technology solidly. Reputation for being abrasive.
Well-connected with other IT people.
Jason Wu BA lead Graphic designer New to the company
Nivetha Scott QA lead End-to-end testing. Knows the system functionality intimately.
Knows everyone in the expense operations vertical
Martin, Jez, Ola, and Saleem
Developers Skilled developers who can do anything.
Have not had face-to-face contact with any business people until recently
Output: Spider Web
Travel RequestiPad app
Output: Lite Charter
Elevator pitch: For ______________________________ Who __________________________________ The ________________is a ________________ That ________________________________. Unlike __________________________ Our product _______________________. Sample suggested by consultant: “For JungleBank stakeholders
who want to maximize their personal ROI, the JungleTravelMobileApp is a portable interface to our travel system that allows corporate travelers to easily schedule their travel, log expenses, and see the status of their reimbursements. Unlike competitor products like Concur or DesertIslandMobileApp, our app incorporates camera scanning and bar codes.”
Output: Product Owner Team Design
Product Owner Responsibility
Name Reasoning
Ultimate determiner of value
Decision-maker for the team
Writer of Epics/Stories/Narratives
Facilitator of SME JAD Sessions
Detailed test designer
SME Wrangler (get them to agree to meetings, etc.)
Product Ownership and Project Initiation
Input: Lite Charter Product Owner team design Story map Consulting firm release plan
Output: modified release plan
Input: Lite Charter
Elevator pitch: For operations users in the Reimbursement/Direct Pay Integration
area
Who maintain flows of data related to reimbursements via Direct Pay
The JungleMobileEnablement is an upgrade to current functionality
That empowers mobile users to access up-to-date information about their reimbursements.
Unlike current functionality
Our product maintains and displays information about per-customer reimbursement status with a lag time of only one day, and provides a secure API allowing the information to be accessed.
Input: Story Map
Input: Recent Staffing News
Joe Jonas has left the company to “pursue other interests”
The JungleTravelMobileApp product manager has just married Ernie Hunsperger and moved to Chennai
Brian Wells has just taken a 3-month paternity leave and put two subordinates in charge who don’t get along with each other.
Input: Proposed Release Backlog
Iteration Epic Value to Sponsor
1-3 E3 MMF – Enable customer access 10
4-6 E2 MMF – Enable feed from warehouse to external facing data store
10
7-10 E4 MMF – Enable faster feed from ops systems to warehouse
8
10-12 E2 MMF – Enable customer updates
6
Output: Your Release Backlog
Iteration Epic Value to Sponsor
SME availability
Product Ownership Among the Details
Input Requirements for one screen Examples
Output Narrative
Input 1: Requirements
Report field
Data source Data type
Length
CID CustomerDB Number
BankID BankDB Number
Date BankFeedDB Date
Description
BankFeedDB Char 35
Input 2: Examples
“If the current system is working right, I can visually scan the log and detect things that don’t look right. Then I can talk to the feed guys about what the glitch was. It would be nice if I could get a report with just the anomolies”
“When the feed is down, I don’t know it until the customer calls with a complaint. I can’t imagine what is going to happen if we start letting people check this on their iPhone.”
Output: Narrative
Epic: In order to minimize the time it will take for a user to see her reimbursements on her iPhone, As a Reimbursement Operator, I want be able to monitor the status of the update feeds.
Acceptance criteria:
Scenario 1 Given _____________________ When______________________ Then_______________________
Scenario 2 Given _____________________ When______________________ Then_______________________
Product Ownership at Delivery Time and
Beyond Input
Current State Backlog Market Update
Output Updated Backlog
Input: Current Backlog State
Iteration Epic Value to Sponsor
Feature Toggle Status
1-3 E3 MMF – Enable customer access
10 Deployed/off
4-6 E2 MMF – Enable feed from warehouse to external facing data store
10 Deployed/off
7-10 E4 MMF – Enable faster feed from ops systems to warehouse
8 Deployed/on
10-12 E2 MMF – Enable customer updates
6 Not deployed
Input 2: Market Update
Corporate spies at Concur reveal that Concur plans to unveil mobile app functionality next month at their Q1 TravelAppJamboree
The JungleMobile team has completed a minimal mobile app that could deploy your team’s back end data to customers, if you are ready.
Output: Updated Backlog State
Iteration Epic Value to Sponsor
Next action
1-3 E3 MMF – Enable customer access
10 Toggle on?
4-6 E2 MMF – Enable feed from warehouse to external facing data store
10 Toggle on?
7-10 E4 MMF – Enable faster feed from ops systems to warehouse
8
10-12 E2 MMF – Enable customer updates
6 Keep building?
Discussion
What have we learned?
Appendix
Agile Transformation “Switch: How to Change when Changing is Difficult”
Concept/Product Owner Team Design DevOps Triangle Lean Startup Spider Web Lite Charter Product Owner Team Design
Inception/Product Owner Team Planning XP Release Planning Story Mapping
Elaboration/Product Owner Decision-Making at the Story Level Feature Injection/Behavior-Driven Development Narrative Template
Delivery/Product Owner Consensus Around Delivery Backlog Grooming Continuous Delivery
Organizational Change: Elephant, Driver, and
PathSwitch: How to Change Things When Change
is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, 2010.
Change requires: Rationally convincing the rider Emotionally convincing the elephant Preparing the path
DevOps Triangle
Agile Project Management, 2nd Edition, Jim Highsmith, 2009.
Lite Charter
A Potential Product Owner Team Design
1 Executive Point person where the buck stops – responsible for getting exec peer cooperation for all needed SMEs
1 Business-side "feature point person" per desired feature (may be business-side project manager, if you have both business and IT PMs)
Some large number of SMEs who have details about value and usage of the feature (contacted only as needed by appointment, with a fall-back appointment arranged in case the first one falls through)
A team of business analysts, user acceptance testers, and business systems analysts who are responsible for knowing which SMEs are needed for each feature, and are able to get those people to the table in a reliable way (part of the core team, always working in the metaphorical team room)
XP Release Planning
Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition, Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, 2004.
Story Mapping
Jeff Patton, “The New User Story Backlog is a Map”
Feature Injection/BDD
Chris Matts, Liz Keogh, Olaf Lewitz (diagram from Lewitz)
“Narrative” Template
Backlog Grooming
Don’t forget to renego-tiate your SME time!
Continuous Delivery with Feature Toggles
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, Jez Humble and Dave Farley, 2010.