 telef MLAN? Thank you so much for attending our session... That is called... Growing up the Product Management Tree. My name is Debbie Reden, I'm an agile coach with JP Morgan. I've been with JP Morgan for roughly about fourteen months A ddweud o gyfnod o'r pergyrch o'r ddysgu cymryd i, ond rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r ddweudio'r coleg hyn. Hei, mae'n Ashish Mediolodau. Mae'n ddweud i'r egheil coche i'r JP Morgan. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ffilm yma i fynd i'r half. Felly, mae'n eich bod yn ei gweithio'r ddweud. Mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r Ddweudio, mae'r ddweud i'r ddweudio gwyddol, yn cyfnod o'r dyfodol, ond, yn y bwysig, yn credu cerddau. Mae'n gyntaf gweithio yn ystafell, os ydych chi'n gyntaf. Felly ydych chi'n go роль, rydyn ni'n gweithio i'n gael mor cyfaint o'r cymdeithas a'r ymddwyllfa cyllid. Ond o'r cyflwyno o'r hanes yw'r hanes yn helio. A tyd ni'r cyfnod yma, rydyn ni'n cyflwno? Rydyn ni, rydyn ni'n cyflwno? Rydyn ni'n cyflwno sy'n cyflwno, mae rwf i'n ddysgu'r holl gwaith. A'n cyfnod o'r honno'u team ysgrwm. OK, a'r oedd y penderfyniad hynny yn y rhan o'r roi o'r cronhau? Gael, OK. Felly mae'n iawn yn gweithio gwybod o'r cronhau o'r ysgrwm i gyd, ac mae'n gweld yn ymddangos o Ashesia a'r colegfyrno gyda'i ymddangos gyda'i cyfeirio gyda'i a'r oedd y cyfnodol yn JP Morgan, But also to pull from our collective previous experiences and other organisations to show you how product development has changed over the years and some of the challenges that we've faced and some of the things we have put in place to try and counteract the issues that we come across. First of all, I wanted to just remind us of our agile values, which of course go together with the 12 principles that we have, and really, as we look at product ownership and have a look at how it's grown up over the years, the past decade, we've pretty much moved away from, or are trying to move away from, a distinct area in an organisation who remains totally detached from what we're doing. From where the value is created, i.e. in our development technology groups. And I guess, you know, as I look at my experience over the years, that's where I've seen significant change happen. We're moving away and getting closer and closer to our development teams, that's what we're aspiring to. And those of you who've attended a number of the keynote sessions and indeed some of the other breakout sessions have heard a lot about product ownership and engagement of product owner, or the owner of the vision and the requirements. But as I look at the agile values, the one that stands out for me the most, and probably is the one that's the most misunderstood, principally because people believe that that's just a value for an organisation who has a customer-vendor relationship, is value number three, which is around customer collaboration over contract negotiation. And it doesn't mean commercial contracts at all, that's not where it's coming in from at all. And that's some misunderstanding that we've certainly experienced, not the least way we work currently but in previous organisations. And really where this value is talking to is in order for us to get close to where the value is being created by our development teams, as product owners, we need to be able to have sensible conversations without playing the contract game. And those of you who've been in large organisations know that they organisationally are structured to encourage that sort of behaviour. You try and come up and define a bunch of requirements. We fix some arbitrary date and time when those requirements have to be delivered by, the specification is frozen, and then we go through the cycle of the business wanting more to be added to the product and the dev team is going less. And then we stick in the cycle of more, more, more, less, less, less, and the contract game starts. With product ownership, it's essential that we start to break those barriers down and we move forward in a partnership relationship. And if I look at any aspect of moving towards an agile way of working, regardless of the framework we apply, that's probably the hardest part of it. It really is hard because not only are we encouraging close collaborative working, we also, if you look from a technology group is we're trying to undo a lot of behaviour that's been entrenched in the organisation for years and years and years. IE, we've given you the requirements, you know what you need to build, go away, build it, and we'll whine when you deliver the wrong thing. And that's classically what happens. If we look at the role of a product owner, certainly as we look at Scrum for instance, and we look at the definition carefully, it actually is a pretty lonely job. When I was trying to match up some graphics to go with the wording, this kind of struck me as being one that more or less epitomises how I see a product owner. Your product owner is really someone who has deep domain knowledge. They also are very much in touch with our customers. They actually do talk to customers and they interact with customers, and that in itself is tough, but those are the sorts of people that we need. If we're going to build, and we heard in the last session, build the right product, right, we need to be in touch with who we're building our product for and what our product is. So that's an important part, being in touch with our customer is absolutely important. Our product owner also has to really have the authority and the responsibility to make decisions. What we're not looking for in a product owner is somebody who has been placed in that position, but still has to go and ask their boss, who then has to go and ask another boss and another boss in order to get a decision made on prioritisation. If I'm going to be taking on the role of product owner, I have that autonomy. I'm responsible to nobody else apart from being responsible to the product, I can make those calls and those decisions. Our product owner, if we lead on from that, should also own a very well-groomed backlog, a list of things that we want in our product, and absolutely understand what that product is made up of. Now, of course, some of the challenges that we're going to touch on is, well, what if our product is massive? How can our product owner possibly understand all of that? And we do have some tactics that you can put in place, some approaches you can use to support your product owner. So we're going to look at some of the challenges. Here's my product owner going down this path of product ownership, some of the challenges that we face as being a product owner and how we can overcome those. And certainly we've seen all aspects of this in our journey so far to date inside the bank. Importantly, the one thing that we do want from our product owner, and again where we have to work very hard at this, is close relationships. Not only in touch with our customer, but building very close relationships with the teams that the product owner actually should be directing. So our product owner and scrum actually directs those teams. The teams are responsible to the product owner, and the product owner steers and directs them in terms of where the product has got to go. So to do that, we want a product owner who can be close to the teams, is not afraid to have a conversation, is willing, keen and eager to participate in the grooming, the backlog grooming activities, or product backlog refinement, as it's also known. We want our product owner to be all of those, and that takes a lot of courage to do so. So very close relationships, both within, directly with the teams and outside facing towards our customers. Principally, I talked about the backlog, well-groomed backlog. A backlog can't exist in isolation. It has to be not just a random list of thoughts that I've had on the train this morning, but it has to be well thought out. It has to be fundamentally prioritised. And that in itself is difficult. We've seen a number of a couple of sessions today where prioritisation has come up. And atypically what you tend to get in organisations is the business side of the partnership where the product ownership is currently sitting, prioritising everything as must-haves. Everything is important. Guys, go build this. It's all important to us. And we know that that's not true. No two requirements are ever the same. Some are more equal than others. And prioritisation, in order for us to understand as technology teams, what we're required to build first is really, really important. But more importantly, making sure we're building the right stuff for the product. So building the right product right is the key thing. And we'll talk a little bit about challenges around prioritising. If I can relate back to a stand-up moment in my career where prioritisation really hit home to a product group, I was working part of a large distributed global team. We had a product owner, product manager at the time it was called. And they did exactly that. Everything was exactly the same order, all must-haves. And we knew there were items on there that were less important than others. So one of my colleagues, who was a bit more braver than I was, because I was quite good in those days until I grew up, he decided that actually to prove the point of how important it was for the product team to steer our development teams, and he actually picked some items off that backlog, which were very low priority. He knew they were low priority, and he built them. And needless to say, when we came to demonstrating the product, of course that's when the feedback came. But those weren't really the requirements we wanted to be delivered. We wanted these other ones delivered, but you told us that everything was equal. So we just picked whatever we wanted to pick. And that proved the point. So sometimes you have to educate your product owners in order to understand how important it is to do the activity of prioritisation. And whatever basis they choose to do it on, because there's many ways I can prioritise, but it is vital and important. And homing them and encouraging them to get towards what is the barest minimum we can get away with and add a lot of value to our customers. What do we need to release first and what can come second and what can come third? And again, because our classic product teams are quite greedy in terms of what they want, they want everything and we end up building a lot of features which often are not used. And in fact I have a good recent example where a product that's just been launched fairly recently, in fact probably about 40-45% of the features are not currently being used. So we've probably invested a lot of time in building features which weren't necessary at that point in time. So prioritising, and that's an activity which certainly in our experience our product owners have not been used to doing and in order to be effective with Scrum and the scaling of Scrum, this is one of the areas we've had to work very hard in. Of course our product owners being close and working very close to our teams, constant communication, face to face being the best, their job is to help clarify those items. So participating, as I said, actively in product backlog grooming, knowing the details of the things that they need to have and not being afraid to recognising when they get it wrong. And I have had a couple of product owners, certainly in my time at JP Morgan, who've actually gone, you know what, actually yeah we did get it wrong, you guys have built the right things but we just didn't know what it was that we were looking for and now we see it, we know where we are. So that instant feedback helped them understand where they were and they've learnt from that and now we can carry on clarifying those items. But clarification and making sure that your teams are clear before they actually enter into the sprinting process is vital. And again that's all part of growing up as a product owner, product manager. The one that we always hear a lot about, certainly during Scrum and I hear a lot of our technology teams really hitting home hard in terms of yes we can't start working to prioritise based upon business value. Now part of it is the technology teams just being a bit lazy because they don't really know what business value means but they've heard the words. But the other part is also very, very important and very subtle and that is knowing how important all these items are so that I can actually pick the ones that are going to give me the biggest bang for my buck and make my customers delighted. And that's what we know as our MVP and the thing that we want to ship first in order to get the product out into market and used so that we can actually get the feedback. So when you're looking at your product owners and learning to grow your product owners and to increase their level of understanding and maturity, often as part of the coaching routine we have to step in and help them understand really what business value means to them. Now how they choose to quantify business value that's purely down to them but in terms of understanding how important it is as part of the process we have to help them do that. So that gives broadly more or less what we're looking for in product owners and product ownership and interestingly we've probably been through most of the challenge that you can possibly ever get with product owners. And I'd say as part of the leaving note when we leave the session later on it requires a lot of patience with your product owners and a lot of help and attention. If there's one thing I can call out is when we've seen some of the sessions going through over the past couple of days I've heard a lot about coaching and mentoring and help but most of it's been aimed at the technology teams. We forget actually to really grow up we have to help our business partners as well and that's where we invest significant amounts of our time to help people understand and grow and learn. So I think all of you have now a fair idea of what a product ownership means and what we all are looking for and when we work with teams that's what we're looking for whether the person who's working with the team from the business side is exhibiting these characteristics, these traits and how do we work and guide them towards these traits. So some of the challenges that we find and this is common across that we've seen like in the bank and in our earlier assignments also. The product ownership is a new thing which came on in the last decade and but earlier you had product managers and you still have product managers but the whole transformation for the product function to this new model nobody has really given a big thought. There is always some bits and pieces of you here but there's no concentrated effort to actually go ahead and give your love to this community. You saw the product owners are pretty lonely in this journey. They have this internal stakeholders now with the team. They already have the customers on their back and they have to grow the revenue and show it back to the business. So they're already in this big whirlpool and so they need to be supported by the team by all these stakeholders. So some of the challenges we find is that the new role specifically let's say in the scrum model we find that the product ownership itself is not clearly defined as to what are the expectations that you would say you have to clarify, you have to prioritize, you have to show the business value and explain and give a share understanding to the team. So I think some of the challenges we find is that the product owners are not real. They are like what we call as fake product owners. So you'll find R&D manager probably if you're in a complex big program so that guy is wearing the hat of a product owner but or you could find even a project manager. Sometimes there are business analysts who are playing the role of a product owner but the question to ask is what we said does that person have the capability to accept or reject your work item when the team produces something can he accept and reject it? Can he tie that work item to the business value? What is the business outcome? Is that work item giving it? Can he prioritize your backlog? Is he able to say this piece of work, this functionality will go in this release one and will build it over and this new piece of functionality which is like the meat will go in the release two. Can he take that decision? So these are the questions you have to ask if you are saying I'm a product owner. If you are not then we say you are in a fake role and that means that you can't really give us the direction or the team the direction that they need and that leads to one of our next challenge which is all about the... Before we flick on to the next challenge I was just going to add in there. In the bank we have a lot of fake product owners and actually they are quite proud about that. Now why do I mean they are quite proud about that? They actually are happy to admit that they are probably in a very temporary position at this point in time in order to keep the wheels going. That doesn't mean to say that that's right but they are happy to say actually we understand the difference between a real product owner i.e. the role that somebody should be in but we are just at the moment trying to keep the wheels going and we are actually a fake product owner. We are making some choices and decisions albeit in concert with our business partners but actually we are fake product owners. I think that's very important for you and for your business stakeholders who are engaging with you to make sure that they understand the difference between the two. Certainly Scrum is very specific about that. So don't call them real product owners if they are not real product owners. Rather let them call themselves fake product owners while you actually make that next step forward in your adoption of product ownership. A Scrum Master be a fake product owner. Should a Scrum Master be a fake product owner? No. A Scrum Master should be the master of Scrum working with the teams to make sure that we keep honest with what we are doing as far as Scrum is concerned. I've not seen a Scrum Master be a product owner more the classic you know if I'm looking at the fake product ownership scenario more classically a business analyst has put in that role because that's the easiest thing to do. You know I'm a product owner I'm too busy or I belong to the product group or the product team I'm too busy you know business analyst you take that role on and we end up with a bit of layering that occurs between the real product owner and the actual teams via the fake product owner. And all the challenges that that involves. So business analysts project managers often step into that role. Development managers sometimes step into it. I've not personally seen a Scrum Master and I'll actively discourage a Scrum Master taking that on. It means they can't pay their full attention to the teams and helping the team optimise their delivery capability. You're welcome. So I think let me let me counteract on that and just give you some food for thought. Remember to ask a series of questions when you think that you are a product owner and one of those is am I first of all am I facing my customer and do I interact with my customer and engage with them on a day by day basis. Secondly do I have the authority and responsibility to make choices about this product without having to ask anybody else. And certainly in my experience project managers yes they may be responsible for the delivery of software or other aspects of the product but they don't have that overall responsibility and authority. Somebody else is above them making those calls about the product. Somebody else is holding that vision and has a distinct vision about what this product really is all about. So let me just leave that one with you because think about that very carefully. There's a distinct difference between a product owner who's driving the vision forward and a project manager who's responsible for the delivery of software. OK and other aspects of that that delivery out to a customer. So think about that and actually do have a make very visible to your business community the sets of questions that you can ask for them to check if they are a product owner. OK that's very easy to do. OK but it's that authority and responsibility which is really really important. Right so I think this challenge that you face if you are in the situation where you have fake product owners right which is primarily the lack of trust right. So now I have this business analyst who's talking to the team internally and the business analyst then goes back to the product manager or the real product owner now right. And then there's this maybe multiple layers even within that right add to the fact that you have distributed teams right. There are time zone challenges along with that. So now you have folks across the oceans talking to each other right and that brings in that whole element of communication right and rather miscommunication. Wherean I tell you that this is what the customer needs and the customer is across the ocean and that's where the real product owner is. And you have somebody here who's saying yeah this is what we understand this is what you told us to deliver and we are delivering this right. But actually what happens within that conversation things tend to get lost get distorted right. So all the classic problems that you have end up creating a big gap right big gap between the product side and the delivery side right. So that's where this big challenge of trust and the trust is which is the relationship that you saw early on right which is so crucial tends to break down and the rift widens right. The other thing is in terms of as you have this challenges right the product management function has been like I said early on has been working in a certain model early right. They've been as a product manager they've been used to the notion of I'll come to the team once a year. I'll tell them this is what the customer is looking for and throw it back that and I'll come after one year and ask what's where's the software. How does it run can I go back to my customers with it right. So that mindset is required shift is now required for us to say yeah in this new model where the teams are now asking for almost daily collaborative discussion to clarify things right to help you prioritize things right. So that's where the new function has to move right. So the old habits old habits have to change right. Yeah. Can we get a mic. Anyway you ask me if we can repeat the question. So we can cover a little bit of that when we hit the solutions part because precisely that you know we too busy we haven't got time we allocate you a fake product owner you deal with them they get busy and things get a bit hectic and chaotic so if you do bear with us we'll cover off that one with you as we get through. So the other big challenge that we've seen across the board is especially in large complex program that we work with is there are so many voices right. If I am a team member right and I have to deliver something every two weeks I want clarity on what do I need to deliver right and you heard earlier we have so many techniques by example and so many other things are there now. But still you get person telling the team do this activity going in the direction north then there's within this friend you'll find another person saying go south right. So there are so many voices for the team again that's the team cannot give you a consistent consistent delivery outcome right and you will find even in large program that if you have multiple product owners right. They may not be on the same page right they will have their own challenges in terms of which is the number one item among that big bucket list of 100 items right that the customer is asking which one is the one that they should put in this upcoming release right. So there are too many voices across the board which needs to be channeled and for the team what we are saying is you should have a single voice which the team should hear right. So that's another big challenge. We'll come to the solutions part of it but that's primarily the whole out landscape in terms of the challenges that we have seen just to name a few. I mean there's a whole host more but these are the ones that if I abstract them back up these are the ones that constantly bubble to the surface. Some of the things that we've looked at in terms of overcoming these challenges around our product ownership and product owners particularly and that is not only make sure that we get the right product owner but when we do have the product owner or even a fake product owner is to empower them. That is very very important give them the authority and the responsibility to be able to make choices and decisions even if that's delegated from the real product owner to a fake product owner that's better. That's a first step forward in our journey of growing up making sure that whoever the team is interacting with doesn't have to now go through layers and layers and layers of hierarchy to get an answer that the team needs now. We want to try and cut that down as much as we can in order to make progress forward. So treat them as a first class citizen empower them. So one of the biggest challenges like we said was the distance or the time zone barriers right so one of the solutions we've found is that you've got to co-locate the product owner with the team. So that's the ideal way to go forward right wherein you have your delivery team sitting next to the product owner so that they have constant interaction face to face right. They're able to get feedback as the customer is talking to the product owner you get input from the field is able to relate that back to the team and say yeah this is what we are hearing back from our customers. These are the pain points. Let's work around it. Let's make our customers happy. So that's should be your number one way forward right but having said that we do live in a world where distributed teams are a reality right. So at least make sure that your delivery teams are co-located. So that's the next step. You don't want a team which has two members in one continent and two members in the other continent right. So you really want to bridge that gap first to make sure at least the delivery team is all together in one room in one workspace and is able to hear and consistently hear the same voice and everybody has a shared understanding. So that way again it all comes down to reducing that communication gap reducing those barriers right. And even even within the bank we're making moves towards you know if I look at India for example we're making moves towards moving responsibility for whole products into the region rather than coping with the distributed nature of development that we've had up until now. Now it's a slow process but it's in motion and that's what we that's what we aiming towards. As a she said you know the ideal is having our product owners as close to the teams as we can. If you can't necessarily achieve that because often our product owners are in North America or Europe then at least find if the business you know your co-operations are out here in India for example then find subject matter experts in your operations areas who can actually provide local expertise to you. So the teams can interact with real people who are actually using using the product and can get instant feedback that way. It doesn't you know doesn't take away from the product ownership that's still vital and important but at least we're now getting closer interaction with the real business. The shocking thing for me when I first started working with large organizations was that many of the team members I worked with didn't actually know what the operations people did. They had never actually taken time out to go have a look at what operations do and actually sat down for a day and just looked at what the people were doing every day in order to better understand the problems they were experiencing. And that in itself is one of the steps that you can take now to help your teams get closer to the product so the product owner does actually have better conversations with them. This is probably of all of them one of the most vital to get right and that is know your product and as we start looking at the world of product ownership and growing up the world of product ownership an application doesn't equate to a product. A product is something which is customer visible. It's generally the thing that you're advertising to the outside world that's your product. How you actually deliver that product is via obviously software and applications and components that make up that product but a classic mistake that is made is that people focus on applications as being their product. Now it might be a case that it is but nine times out of ten my experience shows me that it isn't. And actually having a product owner who understands totally what their product is and the domain that they're in is the second thing to get right. You can't have a product owner who doesn't understand his product. He needs to understand the vision where it's headed and he needs to understand where he wants to go with it. Now if your product is large one of the scaling tactics that you can put into play is by building a product team who support your product owner. Now I don't mean you know we build large organizations like that not at all but your product owner needs some friends who can help him or her and those friends have detailed knowledge about certain aspects of that product and they can help the product owner make the choices and decisions. And I think it all comes down to the fact that how do you build the team work right. The team work required for us for the business side and the technology delivery side to work together right. So how do you get them to build that trust to work as a single team and that comes back to the original manifesto right where you are talking about the collaboration and not playing that contract game right. You're not saying I'll throw this over the wall to you you've got to deliver and the engineering team says yeah we'll do this but this and that. So rather than that you work on the collaborative aspect probably using spec by example or other techniques wherein you're all in it together how many times you might find product owners working with team and team saying yeah this is super easy. I have this widget I can reuse from this library and I can spin it out for you in the next two weeks or you might find yeah we are working on this proprietary software which cost us millions of dollars of license but if we move to this open source software which is wetted by our firm we can save cost for you right. So those are the conversations which help you the overall product right and you can only have that conversation when you have trust in each other right. So all right at the end the key takeaways for us with the challenges that we have seen treat your product owners as first class citizens that's number one you've got to empower them make sure you have real product owners not fake product owners right. Then make sure when you have that product owner team you support them whether it's building a community of practice within the product owner group itself whether giving them whatever support they need through trainings through interacting with the teams through ambassador whether it could be all sorts of tricks right but make sure you give them all the support that they require and then when you're choosing your product owners right. So they understand what a product is right I think that pretty much covers what we have for you. So any questions. OK yeah yeah OK OK so one of the things to think about is remember that product owner is not a full time role. OK isn't that's the myth that most people would believe in actually I think it's a full time role your real product owners actually are busy people very busy people. The first thing to do is to really sit down with them and work out with them whether they truly understand the importance of that product ownership role. They still even though they are busy people they still need to be actively engaged in the vision for their product and steering it steering it in the direction that they want to release that product in because they're the ones who out there and typically for most commercial organizations your product is the thing you're selling out to your customer and your product owners are the ones who are in touch with where they want to make their next move in terms of releasing out to market. So they understand they should understand their vision they understand the release roadmap they want to take so therefore they should be in touch with the order and priority they want things are doing them. Now does a product owner have to turn up at each and every product backlog grooming event or PBR. No if they are the expert in a particular aspect of your product then yes if not good subject matter experts play the role of those of the individuals who are providing that knowledge into the product and that's who you're working with in order to flesh out the detail. The product owners set the idea out there he knows what he wants he or she knows what they want and now we can use other experts in the organization to help build that understanding. But the product owner at the end of the day will still prioritize that doesn't take that long to do of their busy day and I reckon I think my colleague Tim and I have had a look at this and if you tot up the amount of time a real product owner has to spend with a scrum team it's probably I don't know Tim what you reckon. Yeah 15% of their time yeah that's about it. Yeah they need to they do need to understand what it means to be a product owner though so as a she said training is essential so not just the training following it up intensively with coaching and helping them understand how they can manage that backlog without becoming an onerous activity. Okay they've still got you know they've got other experts in the organization who can provide the detail and fill in the gaps but the ask is very clear on that backlog. We just need to now make it even more clear by using our experts and that's how you free up the time because real product owners are busy. They're running the organization okay and that's that's where the first time in block is I absolutely relate to what you what you say. Yeah and I think I'll just add to that that in this new model I heard this right so agile teams will turn out crap very quickly if you don't guide them right. So if your product owner is spending the money right yeah yeah it's it's both both both sides need help and both sides need to come together to figure it out. The beauty of course of any iterative incremental development framework is instant feedback and fast feedback loops every couple of weeks and for product owner that is one essential meeting that they absolutely have to be at is that that sprint review. That's our instant feedback loop then we can provide comfort in terms of is the product moving in the right direction have we got it wrong did the product owner mess up in terms of his understanding of what his ask was his or her ask. Ladies and gentlemen at the end of our session the next session I think is going to be starting fairly shortly. Thank you so much for coming and hopefully we've just given you a few little thoughts to take away. I could talk about product ownership all day every day. It's one of the things I feel quite strongly about. So feel free to catch us at any time. We've certainly learned a lot over the past year and we learn every day. I'll learn every day about what it means to be a better product owner and how we can help our product owners steer and guide our teams to building fantastic software. Thank you.