The Leadership Connection
In a recent Certified Scrum Product Owner course, we presented the following slide that contrasted Acceptance Criteria to a team’s Definition of Done:
I saw one of our students light up. I knew that her “light bulb” had gone off. As many others who have seen this slide in the past, I would have expected that she got insight around the quality and completeness of functionality. This student was new to Agile and was attending the course to learn more about Scrum and the business interaction through the Product Owner role. She brought a tremendous amount of experience in business having been in management and consulting roles over the years. Once I saw that she had an insight, I used the opportunity to ask her if she could share her findings with the group. What I found is that she had a whole different insight to share.
She started by sharing about her experiences with management, and that management has traditionally been put in place to tell people how to do things. They would create policies and procedures to make sure people did things the “right” way given their own definition of what “right” meant. This culture goes back to Frederick W. Taylor’s view of management:
“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”
But now through Scrum, the Delivery Team defines what work needs to be done every Sprint and ensures they build the work right through their Definition of Done. This is why we say that the team is “self-managing” in Scrum. They have the skills, knowledge and experience to do what the business wants them do and can figure out how to get the work done to the best of their ability. This was exciting to her that there was this process framework called Scrum that would help support the empowerment of teams.
What does management now do in Scrum if they aren’t telling people what to do and how to do it? The student continued to share more of her insight. Leadership is needed to ensure that the team is building the right things. The team needs a vision of the overall product. They need a roadmap of releases to see where the product is going. They need somebody to help them understand requirements. They need a person to go to determine the next priority item to work on via the Product Backlog. Product Owners can provide a lot of that leadership, but it can also come from other levels of management to provide additional advice and support.
Most people in technical management roles didn’t start out as such, in fact they started their careers as being part of a software team in a particular technical skill. They gained knowledge and skills over time and were recognized for their efforts. They were usually rewarded by being promoted into management. And, many of them secretly wished they were back in those roles and continuing to increase their technical skills. These technical managers can provide leadership through mentoring around best practices. They don’t need to tell people what to do and how to do it the right way, but can help develop these people so they can be a successful team member and truly be self-managed. They can be the very ones that can “Give them the environment and support they need,and trust them to get the job done.” as stated in the Agile Manifesto principles.
I love it when I learn from my students in classes, which happens more often than I expect. This student’s experience and particular perspective was invaluable for being more meaning into what the Product Owner role is and the Scrum framework in general.
Tags: leadership, management, product owner, Scrum