I just saved my team weeks of work and thousands of 💰💰💰 in budget in just 1 hour!
Here’s the story that may be valuable to Product Owners and their teams:
I’m the Product Owner of the “Plug & Play Scrum Team”. For our current product, I had a particular Product Backlog Item in my Product Backlog. Let’s call it “Assessment xyz”. It was clear that developing it would have consumed a significant amount of the team’s capacity and thousands of euros in budget. Today, after 20 minutes of refining this item, one of the Developers challenged us to think about whether we needed it at all. Thirty minutes later, we had found a solution that achieved the same outcome for a fraction of the development effort. That’s how simple our new solution is. With less than an hour of our time, we saved weeks of work and thousands of dollars that we can now invest elsewhere!
The lesson: Nothing beats a direct conversation between team members, no matter how smart the product owner is or how detailed the product backlog item is described in advance. So, Product Owners, instead of spending more time writing (!) requirements, use that time to communicate with your team.
People much smarter than me said that about 22 years ago:
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. -> Talk to each other!
“Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential.” -> Less is more!
https://agilemanifesto.org/
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More about the Plug & Play Scrum Team:
https://plug-and-play-scrum.team/
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