Managing the Middle: Product Owners and the Politics of Backlog Management
Product owners often find themselves stuck in the middle of a complex and swirling set of political, organizational, and customer forces when dealing with their backlogs. Each of the stakeholders who interact with the product owner want different levels of detail, degrees of traceability, and understanding of practical and strategic intent.
Customers want to see that you’re listening to their needs with reasonable traceability. Executives, who don’t have the interest or attention span to listen to a product owner explain the details, want product owners to communicate fewer and more strategic items. The development team, on the other hand, require that product owners elaborate backlog items to a level of detail that they can estimate effort, develop acceptance criteria, and demonstrate progress within the chosen timebox. Finally, the rest of the organization, ranging from sales to service and support, require that product owners communicate accurate information about the final results, typically in a mix of both strategic and tactical importance.
The purpose of this workshop is to explore ways that product owners and product managers have successfully communicated product backlogs. Please come prepared to share your approach to at least one facet of the communication and management of a backlog.
I intend to moderate the discussion, allocating time roughly as follows:
- 10m: review of the workshop goals, introductions
- 15m: best practices for managing customer input
- 15m: best practices for communicating and managing executive expectations
- 15m: best practices for communicating and elaborating backlog items for developers
- 15m: best practices for disseminating results of the release to marketing, sales, service, and support
- 20m: shared discussions, conclusions, and capturing results for sharing with others outside of the workshop
I will be prepared to seed discussions on each facet based on Enthiosys consultant experiences in working with client teams. However, since this is not intended to be a tutorial, I will only seed discussions when necessary to “jump start” the conversation. My expectation is that the experiences of the workshop participants will provide ample material to solicit and share best practices.