The Product Owner in a Corporate Environment


Organizer bio: Koen De Hondt & Bart De Gruyter

Objectives:
Discuss some hard problems about the implementation of the Product Owner role that require a solution in order to apply Scrum successfully in a corporate environment.
Contents:
Consider a corporate environment where multiple teams across the globe develop different subsystems of a product. The teams develop multiple versions in parallel: major releases, service packs and hot fixes. Consider a classic organization, where program management, system architecture, development and QA are different groups. Consider that 5 to 10 people in the organization influence the vision and the future of the product: the CTO, product manager, architects, QA engineers, developers, service engineers, documentation. Consider that the largest part the development team applies Scrum and the rest of the organization does not. How should the role of the Product Owner be defined in this setting? Is having 1 Product Owner a valid option? Is it a full-time job? Is it a role that can be combined with another role in the organization? How does a Product Owner manage the evolution of different subsystems of the product?
Process & Timetable:

  • Introduction [20 minutes]
    • Explanation of the purpose of the session and the session format (fish bowl).
    • Introduction to Centera
    • Centera development: 3 sites, 7 teams, working relationships with other teams in the organization
    • In order to let the whole audience start from the same premises, establish a common definition of the Product Owner: role, soft skills, who.
  • Discussion [90 minutes, 15 minutes per topic]
    The organizers bring 6 topics for discussion. This is a tentative list we will choose from:
    • Is being a product owner a full-time job? What should a product owner do on a daily basis? Can a product owner handle 2 jobs, for instance development manager and product owner?
    • On which activities/meetings do you think the product owner should be present?
    • How does the product owner succeed to balance functional and non functional work on the product backlog?
    • Does the product owner (team) need to come up with all stories for all teams/projects?
    • Can one product owner manage more than one product?
    • In principle the product owner should attend the planning review meeting of the team. How does that work when you only have 1 product owner, but you have multiple sites with different teams at each site?
    • Is one product owner for multiple sites a feasible solution? Would a product owner team with one product owner team member per site be a better solution?
    • What should be the granularity of the backlog items when multiple sites work together on the same product?
    • What are the requirements for tools support in this context: multi-site, multi-team, multi-product, and product owner team?
    • In a corporate environment, who should be a member of a product owner team?
    • Who is the product owner in a project that is totally non customer visible but aims to make the system more stable or scale better? The bulk of the prioritizations are only understood by a developer or an architect.
    • What can we learn from open source projects? Do they address some of the problems?
    When starting a topic, we will briefly sketch the relevance of the topic in our context.
  • Wrap-up [5 minutes]
    Drawing conclusions and wrapping up the session.

Session Format:
Goldfish bowl

The advantage of a fish bowl session is that all attendants can contribute to all discussions. They also are part of all the discussions. A fish bowl format is also very dynamic and fun and it stimulates brainstorming. For these reasons, we choose a fish bowl format, rather than having breakout sessions or a mini sprint.
Intended Audience:
Journeyman, master We expect that the audience knows what Scrum is. People with multi-site development using an agile process will be very productive contributors to the discussion.
Benefits of participating:
Getting insight in the issues that surface when an organization wants to introduce Scrum in a large corporate environment, especially the issues concerning the definition and the implementation of the Product Owner role. .
Benefits of organizing:
The organizer expects to get some fresh ideas on how to deal with the issues being discussed.