At the December 10th I led the discussion about the Product Owner role in Scrum.  I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with the attendees and learned a great deal about the role.

Introductory Slides

I started the topic by showing a few slides from the excellent presentation “Being an Effective Product Owner,” by Roman Pichler.  The slides defined the many attributes, qualities and focus of a good Product Owner.  As usual, I was awed by the person described there.  If you have such a person on your team, keep them!

We then reviewed the basic roles of Scrum, to put the Product Owner position in perspective.  As we discussed, I updated the marker board.

Open Discussion

Having consumed about 30 minutes with the contextual introduction, we opened the floor for questions and peer discussion.  This was great!  It was very easy to just bring up some aspect of a Product Owner’s work and have people ask and answer around it.  I apologize for taking so long to write this summary because I don’t remember all the things that were discussed.  Some I do remember were about:

• Getting the Product Owner to better fulfill the role.
• Product Owners for large teams or multiple teams.
• Dealing with enterprise deadlines as a Product Owner.
• What happens to the team when Product Owners make demands.
• How the role works on a large project with many Scrum teams.

I hope someone took great notes and is willing to share them with the group.  Post them or link to them as comment below.  I’d love to read about details I may have missed!

After Discussions

I enjoyed the opportunity to talk to each other about Scrum during the break and after the main part of the meeting.  Seemed everyone was networking and learning from each other.  That is exactly the sort of reason to have meetings, peer support and community.

Perry and I also asked for ideas about future meeting topics.  I published these on the group mailing list and repeat them here for convenience.

• How do things like architecture concerns, hardware requirements, costs and other constraints fit into the Scrum framework?
• Doing documentation in Scrum.
• The relationship between Scrum and other Agile frameworks such as Extreme Programming, Lean, etc.
• Working with quality assurance on or with a Scrum team.
• Do a user story workshop, as in actually fill out story cards based on a requirements document or feature list
• Using Scrum to develop video games
• Something about “future shock” (I just noted “future shock” but now don’t remember what that means. The person suggesting had some great ideas about it.  Please fill in the details!)

This is the beginning of a PhxSUG Meeting Product Backlog that we intend to make a way to publish and keep visible to the group.  (If you have a suggestion of how to publicly communicate our group backlog, please let us know!)

Thank You

The evening was a great success, from my view at the front.  Thanks to high participation by the attendees and great food from Some Burros and provided by our Infusionsoft hosts, I rather enjoyed the experience.  I look forward to more meetings and interaction!