My Scrum Team just saved us 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 on the Plug & Play Scrum Team [1]. 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 taken a significant amount of the team's capacity, likely an entire Sprint or even more, 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 and captured a solution that will achieve the same outcome for a fraction of the development effort, maybe just a few hours of work. That's how simple our new solution is! Within less than an hour of our time, we saved weeks of work and thousands of euros that we can now invest into other user needs!
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 more than 22 years ago:
- "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
- "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation." - "Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential."
(https://agilemanifesto.org/)
[1] https://plug-and-play-scrum.team/