(by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman)

On Product Manager in the Team

This post is the second in a series related to product management and product teams. Like the previous post, this one is partly influenced by Marty Cagan’s article on “Product Teams” vs “Feature Teams”. Marty seems to see the role of Product Manager different than we do, but the difference is probably more about the team than about the Product Manager. That said, this post is especially influenced by the frequent recurring question, “Should a Product Manager be on the Team?”

Being on the Team in LeSS

First, let us clarify that a little bit by exploring what “part of the Team” means in LeSS.

The Team has a shared responsibility for the result of a Sprint. A shared responsibility means that, even though people on the team probably have a primary specialization and a preferred focus area (which may not be the same, because of learning), all of the members of the team are responsible for all the work that the team does. In practice, this results in vague boundaries between the individual team members primary specialization, and in some teams not even a meaningful distinction.

A Team in LeSS (and Scrum) is also self-managing. What’s the implication of that on a team taking a shared responsibility? Key point: the team will need to have (1) a clear shared goal, (2) at the same time. We want to stress the temporal aspect here as it is rarely discussed but really important! When a new self-managing team is formed in which previously the team members were used to traditional siloed single-function roles, then if they continue that pattern, the team will struggle with finding ways to parallelize their work. The first and easiest questions is, how can we test before the implementation is done? Then, the same question needs to be answered related to the other roles that used to work in a sequential lifecycle with handoff, “How can we do the UI design at the same time as the implementation?”, “How can we do the analysis at the same time as the implementation”.

The fundamental problem that self-managing teams with shared responsibility have to solve is: How can we together in parallel work on activities that were previously considered sequential?

(by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman)

(translation by Aki Enomoto)

(by Ahmad Fahmy and Craig Larman. Originally published at Scrumalliance.org in 2013)

How long does it take to reorganize to adopt Scrum in an organization? Three hours ;) …

This was my very first time in New York. The 16 hours flight from Singapore didn’t make the conference experience less exciting. I was expecting to see some skyscrapers, however, got something looking like Amsterdam, hmmm. It’s nice that the LeSS conference got to keep its style as always. This keeps my hopes up for the next year LeSS conference in Munich.