Suggested Leadership Actions

Inspect

• Review staffing for the Product Owner role on your teams. How effective are the people you have in this critical role? Are they adding to the teams’ effectiveness, or are they weak links in the chain?

• Investigate the techniques that your teams are using for requirements prioritization. Do the techniques support implementing based on ROI order?

• Investigate whether your teams are implementing functionality purely on a fine-grain, descending business value basis without any consideration of the big picture.

Adapt

• If your Product Owners are not effective, develop them or replace them.

• Work with your teams to adopt a technique for prioritizing product backlog items—such as T-shirt sizing or story mapping.

• Work with your teams to implement story mapping for the purpose of supporting coherent packages of functionality.