BONUS: Helping Product Owners Make Decisions Quickly With Experiments, And Lean Startup | Vasco Duarte

BONUS: Helping Product Owners Make Decisions Quickly With Experiments, And Lean Startup, With Vasco Duarte

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Merry Christmas, everyone! We hope your holiday season is filled with joy and festive cheer. As we continue our Christmas week BONUS episodes, today's focus is on empowering Product Owners (POs) to quickly make informed decisions based on the definition of value and value metrics. 

As usual in this year’s BONUS week of episodes, this episode is a crucial companion to the Coach Your Product Owner e-course, accessible at bit.ly/coachyourpo.

Quick Decision Making is the Goal!

While defining and measuring value are vital, our ultimate objective as Scrum Masters is to expedite the decision-making process. The pace of software development is directly correlated with the speed at which POs, stakeholders, and the team make decisions. Today, we discuss how Scrum Masters can help their teams, PO’s and stakeholders, make informed decisions faster.

Quick decision-making not only accelerates development but also contributes to learning faster, and discovering what does not need to be done at all! This aligns with Agile's principle of maximizing the work not done.

What Do POs Need to Make Decisions Quickly?

Understanding the obstacles to swift decision-making, we identify two types of obstacles:

Lack of Information: Relevant information is crucial for decision-making, and when it is missing it makes decisions slow, or impossible at all.

Timely Information: Having information at the right time ensures decisions align with current needs, information that is delivered too late does not help us avoid working on useless backlog items, among other things.

Let's delve into addressing each of these challenges.

First: Help Collect Information That Matters

Define Value: As discussed on Monday, defining the value for products is the first step in collecting the right information.

Measure Value: Tuesday's episode covered measuring value through metrics, providing valuable insights for decision-making.

Experimentation: Today, we discuss the process of experimentation to collect information efficiently. Real-world examples illustrate how experiments reveal the right metrics, emphasizing the importance of evaluating whether the collected information aids decision-making.

Second: Collect Relevant Information in a Timely Fashion

Strategic Metrics vs. Day-to-Day Metrics: As discussed in yesterday’s episode, distinguish between strategic metrics (top-level indicators) and day-to-day metrics (granular, changing metrics). These day-to-day metrics enable daily experiments and timely decision-making.

Metrics Tree: Introduced in yesterday’s episode, the Metrics Tree tool helps decompose top-level metrics into lower-level, day-to-day metrics. This tool facilitates running experiments that deliver the necessary information for informed decision-making.

Speeding Up Decision Making For Product Owners: Summary

In conclusion, today's episode highlighted the significance of quick and adaptive decision-making for the Product Owner role. The key takeaways include:

Ensure you're collecting the right information.

Collect that information swiftly, even within 24 hours (more on that in tomorrow’s episode).

All episodes this week are companions to the Coach Your PO e-course, available at bit.ly/coachyourpo. Today’s episode is a complement to the following modules:

Version 1, Module 8: Defining the Perfect Sprint Goals – emphasizes using metrics for decision-making.

Version 2, Module 02: How Scrum Masters Can Onboard a New or Beginner Product Owner – discusses goal setting and metrics.

Version 2, Module 03: How to Work with a Skeptical PO – highlights the importance of requirements discovery in decision-making.

For more details, visit the Coach Your PO e-course page at: bit.ly/coachyourpo.

If live coaching aligns better with your needs, reach out to us at coaching@oikosofy.com.

Continue your learning journey, keep supporting your team, and join us for the next episode, where we discuss how to setup experiments that you can run in 24h or less!

About Vasco Duarte

Vasco is a leading voice in the agile community, known for his contributions to the development of agile methodologies and practices. He is the co-founder of Agile Finland and the host of Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, the most popular Agile podcast in the world, which has more than 10 000 000 unique downloads. He is also the author of “NoEstimates: A novel look at how Agile can transform software development, making it both more sustainable, as well as incredibly profitable.” Vasco is a keynote speaker at many conferences and events, sharing his knowledge and experience with the agile community. With his passion and expertise in agile, Vasco has made a significant impact on the way software development is done today, helping organizations to become more efficient, flexible, and responsive to changing requirements.lYou You can link with Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn and connect with Vasco Duarte on Twitter.