Bridging communication gaps between Scrum teams and stakeholders | Thomas von Busse

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Communication to remove misunderstandings is perhaps one of the most important roles of a Product Owner. In this episode, we talk about enabling communication between the team and stakeholders. We also explore what happens when PO’s try to manipulate teams through estimation discussions.

In this episode, we refer to Thomas’ article on retrospectives based on the Slow Thinking Manifest.

The Great Product Owner: Bridging the communication gap

Great Product Owners worry about helping the team to understand what the goals are, and how the business can benefit from the work being discussed. In this segment, we talk about the Product Owner that enabled communication between the team and stakeholders directly. Avoiding miscommunication may be one of the major concerns for the Product Owner role, and the pattern we discuss in this segment may be the right answer for you.

The Bad Product Owner: The estimation manipulator

Product Owners that have a background in software development may have the temptation to second-guess the teams they work with. However, the situation gets even worse when they try to second-guess their estimates. There are many reasons why this anti-pattern has a negative impact on the team, and that’s why we need to be ready to tackle it as Scrum Masters. 

Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.

About Thomas von Busse

Thomas is a Scrum Master since 2013. After his Bachelors’s Degree in Software Engineering, he gained experience as a Programmer and uses this deep understanding of how to build software systems to help his Teams get better with each iteration. 

You can link with Thomas von Busse on LinkedIn and connect with Thomas von Busse on Twitter.