Scrum Product Owner Anti-Patterns (8) – Last Minute Changes (Hands-on Agile Webinar #6)

If you are working as a product owner, there is — very likely — room for improvement. I curated the most common product owner anti-patterns to help you up your game. If you like to improve on those anti-patterns that you recognize why don’t you ask the scrum master and the team for support? The product owner anti-patterns list is a good starting point for a mutually beneficial retrospective.

According to the Scrum Guide, the product owner is sole and accountable person optimizing the work of the engineers. In other words, the product owner has ideas or identifies ideas, or at least he or she curates suitable ideas from wherever and validates them whether those ideas are “product backlog worthy” or not. In my experience, this approach turns the product owner into the Achilles heel — or bottleneck by design — of the whole process. If you "remove" the PO as an independent and respected role, for example, by sticking with your organizations' stage-gate process, Scrum easily mutates into a Waterfall 2.0 process.

This Hands-on Agile mini-series addresses 12 familiar product owner anti-patterns interfering with the concept of the Scrum product owner role. Learn how to improve your professional performance by avoiding the typical product owner mistakes: from oversized product backlogs and prioritization by proxy, to be absent during the sprint, and outing yourself as a loner during the sprint review.

This episode covers how the product owner might be toying with the definition of ready. The PO tries to squeeze in some last-minute user stories that do not meet the definition of ready. (Principally, it is the prerogative of the product owner to make such kind of changes to ensure that the development team is working only on the most valuable user stories at any given time. However, if the scrum team is otherwise practicing product backlog refinement sessions regularly, these occurrences should be a rare exception. If those happen frequently, it indicates that the product owner needs help with prioritization and team communication. Or the product owner needs support to say ‘no’ more often to stakeholders.)

HOST: Stefan Wolpers