Mission Control

Ok, it’s time I put my product owner hat on and confess. Confess in recent failure.

So we have just finished the sprint of our community site project. The scope was to develop the groups functionality and expand it to projects and teams.

The base group functionality should include forums, administration of groups and all the rest standard features. The biggest business value I saw was in the extensions of the base functionality to cover needs of the projects and teams.

Well, I must tell we did not quite thought it through on how we would integrate those extensions with the other project and team functions we already have.

We planned the backlog for the sprint and just jumped into it, leaving some ambiguities to be addressed at the end of the sprint.

The sprint was planned for 3 weeks. It was perfectly executed by the team based on Scrum, with several intermediate demos to me as the product owner. It was all good to the point where the ambiguities popped up. By that time, we already have figured a better approach for the implementation of projects functionality. We realized it is better addressed by other modules of Itteco platform, which is another sub-project of ours.

As the result, we dropped the groups extensions, leaving the base functionality. As the most business value was concentrated in extensions, the business value of the 3 weeks sprint dropped down to zero, even though the functionality is shippable.

Nice, eh? So, here is my take on what would need to be done to mitigate it:

• Think ahead. Once you did – think again. The better you define the stories for your sprints, the better the results will be. This is especially true if there several teams working on your product. You have to integrate the effort. Scrum of scrums should help enormously. We have to start doing it.
• The higher the uncertainty, the shorter the sprints should be. In our case, we are rolling back to weekly sprints.
• As per Scrum, the team has to be left alone once the sprint backlog is defined. If you have high level of uncertainty, it may be wise to abandon Scrum and refuge other agile methods such as lean/XP. This way, the lead time is shorter, which allows for better flexibility.

The main lesson learned: stay focused. The ambiguities squeezed into the sprint as the attention was put on other matters, which happens all the time in startup life.