399: Are product managers using Scrum as best as they can? – with Fred Fowler

Insights for product managers from a Scrum Master

Scrum is a frequently used approach for software projects and many other types of projects that would benefit from agility, including physical products. While Scrum is common, there are still many issues organizations encounter using Scrum. To understand how to overcome them, you would want to hear from a real master, and that is Fred Fowler, one of only 50 individuals in the United States who holds the prestigious Professional Scrum Master Level III certification. Fred has been developing software in Silicon Valley for more than 35 years. He tackles many of the issues he has encountered in his book Advanced Scrum Case Studies: Real-World Situations and How to Address Them.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:03] What attracted you to Scrum and becoming a Scrum practitioner?

It’s hard to pinpoint the actual moment. I’ve been developing software forever, and for a long time I made my living working with people who didn’t understand technology very well but understood business. By understanding their needs, I was able to craft solutions that fit their needs.

Scrum is about identifying needs and organizing people to fill those needs in a way that can be measured. I can’t emphasize enough how important measurement is, because unless you’re measuring, you have no idea whether things are getting better or worse. One of the most powerful aspects of the Scrum framework is its emphasis on measuring things—in product development, measuring the value of the product.

In the world of software, many software practitioners don’t focus on measuring the value of their products. They measure the effort users put in but not the value users get out. It’s very important to measure the right stuff.

[6:18] What metrics should product teams measure?

Measuring the productivity of individual developers is impossible and a waste of time. Almost all the metrics I’ve heard about are just measurements of effort. There’s no point in measuring effort because you’re not finding out whether that effort is producing value. The only thing that makes sense to measure is the value of the product.

A product owner or product manager is the person who is the investor in the world of Scrum. The product backlog is a list of needs to be filled. It’s the product owner’s responsibility to figure out which needs are valuable to work on now. There’s a negotiation between the product owner and the developers to reach an agreement about what is going to be produced by the end of a fixed period of time called a sprint.

The developers figure out whether the product is possible and the product owner figures out whether it’s valuable. The product owner invests the time of the team to develop valuable results.

In software, people get focused on technology and measure effort because it’s easy, but you need to figure out whether you’re developing something that is worth more than the cost you’re putting into it.

[9:38] How do you measure value?

The product owner needs to use the tools of product management to put a gauge on the value. The customer needs to give feedback. In the Scrum framework, during the sprint review, you look at the state of the product at the end of the sprint and have people who want to buy it in the room reacting. They give guidance to the product owner, who builds the feedback into the Scrum cycle. Ideally, have the customers heavily involved. If you have a single customer, that’s simple. If you have a mass market, you need focus groups or test markets.

[11:52] How are customers used to provide feedback and what are some of the decision criteria for how they’re part of the project?

There’s only one way to measure the product’s value: Sell it.