The chief product owner will be responsible for working with the individual scrum product owners to achieve the following:
- Align features of the individual feature and component areas with the strategic vision of the business sponsor
- Direct the management of the program backlog
- Divide the work of product ownership across the team and
- Work with line product owners to minimize technical debt.
A large scale Agile program can be divided into feature and component teams. Each team will have a different set of features that make up their backlog of work. As sprints are planned on an individual level it will be important to vet these at the larger level to identify any technical or feature dependencies. The chief product owner will be responsible for working with the line product owners to deliver releases that are delivering the most important features first while keeping the financial objectives of the program in mind. The chief product owner may insert themselves in some of the daily scrum meetings and scrum reviews. The chief product owner will also support line product owners in maximizing feature deliverables to obtain the best minimally viable product at the lowest cost. Forward thinking chief product owners use industry meetings and market analysis to fine tune the vision of a large Agile project using the iterative inspect and adapt framework.
A program backlog can be a large unwieldy set of features that are difficult to manage by one individual (1). Line product owners will manage features that correspond with the features or components of their respective feature or component scrum teams. The chief product owner will be responsible for evaluating the order of feature delivery across the scrum teams. Release planning will take place at multiple times during the life of the program. The chief product owner will first identify epics in the overall program and create an initial release schedule with the input of the line product owners. Features are then defined and assigned to individual scrum teams for execution. Backlog planning ceremonies with the line product owners will be iterative in nature. Features can be transferred among scrum teams, consolidated and sometimes eliminated as the product matures through sprint deliveries.
Large Agile scrum programs require a significant amount of product owner work. The job of a chief product owner is not to take on the tasks of the entire program but, to work with the line product owners to divide work into manageable portions. This division of responsibilities will also support the line product owners in their work so that they can provide support required for the individual scrum teams to be successful. Line product owners will have responsibility for developing their scrum backlogs, working with the scrum teams in the development of user stories and leading scrum team sprint reviews. The chief product owner will take on the overall responsibility for strategic planning of features on the backlog and release planning across the program.
Technical debt is defined as developing software in the short-term that is quick to deploy but, will require significant rework in the later stages of a project. Rework is also a consideration when attempting to make a software product scalable for expanded usage. Large Agile programs have a unique challenge with multiple scrum teams developing software independently. The chief product owner will be responsible for working with the line product owners to minimize technical debt. The first place to identify the risk of incurring technical debt is during the definition of features and user stories. As the velocity and collaboration within and among the individual scrum teams increase, team members will be better able to recognize potential issues. The collaborative nature of the Agile scrum framework challenges developers to openly discuss any concerns that they may have about the delivery of software for features. While it is the scrum master for each team who will be responsible for resolving challenges for developers, the final ownership for delivery of a product that meets the ROI of the organization is left with the chief product owner. Delivering software that is riddled with technical debt may satisfy a short-term need and handicap an organization from growing the product without extensive rework. It is not simply good enough for a chief product owner to deliver the product. He must also deliver one that uses company resources in an intelligent manner at the time of delivery and for the foreseeable life of the product.
The role of the chief product owner has responsibility for the vision and delivery of a set of features for a large scale Agile project. This responsibility does not mean that additional hierarchy is being added to the Agile scrum framework. The role is designed to support and facilitate the work of scrum teams to ensure that the vision of the business sponsor is achieved by delivering minimally viable products.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: