The Agile Manifesto For Product Owners – Part 2

Collaboration, on the other hand, is a different ball-game altogether. Agile requires the customer to be involved throughout the development of the product. Constant feedback is received from the customer through demos to ensure that the product is meeting customer needs.

Product Owner and Scrum team collaborate with the each other and the customer to create the deliverables that provide maximum possible value to the customer. This collaboration is done through a prioritized product backlog. Apart from keeping the product backlog updated as per changing needs of the customer, every sprint ends with a demo to the customer which allows product owners and scrum teams to receive feedback from the customer to validate if they are actually meeting customer requirements or not.

Changes are incorporated easily into product backlog and sprint backlog are created as per stories keeping in mind high priority requirements of the customer.

Responding to change over following a plan

Traditional software development followed a defined plan and despised change. There were budgets build into the project and any change required certain additional cost. The approach was to avoid change as it caused a ruckus to the elaborate, detailed plans created for the project with a defined set of functionalities to be delivered. This approach created hindrances in bringing more valuable products to the market with better features.
Agile, however, works in smaller packets of iterations and a small cycle of sprints are planned at a time. This allowed priorities to be shifted and changing requirements easily gets introduced within the sprints. Changes improve the product and provide additional value.

A product owner needs to be always in sync with changing requirements of the customer/market and keep a prioritized product backlog at all times. He ensures that sprints are planned in the way that the deliverables of a sprint provide maximum value to the customer.

The Agile values and principles are aimed at the alignment of software development with changing business needs and all four values of Agile manifesto demonstrates how agile encourages and welcomes changes. Agile projects are focused towards addressing customer needs and increases the speed of delivering working software to the customer.

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