One of the things that many agile approaches, that I’ve been involved in or nearby, get stuck on is the role of the Product Owner. The role simply doesn’t sit right in bigger organizations. I think there are many reasons for that and I will share a few in this post.

I also wanted to share an unlikely but great example of a great product owner that I met at my current client.

Finally I will share some ideas on how to remedy the problems often found around the product owner role in big organizations (where I mostly worked).

But first let’s meet a great product owner.

Ten years ago today I started this blog.

I really can’t believe that sentence just looking at it. But during that time I’ve learned so much by putting my understanding into words and out on the internet that I really cannot value the experience of having a blog enough.

In this post I wanted to share a few highlights from the 1066 posts (including this) I’ve written and all the stories and relations it has created.

From time to time we might end up with policies and ways of working that just seems like it’s “the way we do things here”. It can be tooling, procedures and even contractual policies but also many of the practices that we take for granted in agile and lean software development; stand ups, boards or user stories.

I’ve found that thinking outside of the context that we have created for ourselves is often very hard, and I am the first one to default to things that worked for me before.

In this post I wanted to introduce you to two questions and thoughts that helped me pushed me out of my comfort zone and let me ponder;

Is this really important? For who?

I’ve just completed my first ever big room planning meeting (a type of exercise made famous by SAFe in their PI Planning). That was quite an exercises and I’m totally worn out. But also immensely impressed by the team and the amount of learning that took place in the room today.

It was quite noisy at times but after 8 hours we went home with our sights aligned and a much better feel for what we will do the upcoming period (5 weeks in our case).

Still I could not get one thought out of my head. It stuck there a few days back and won’t get unjammed:

This big room planning stuff is really an anti-pattern and should be eliminated

In this post I want to explain why and also tell you why I still think it was great.

I’m a big fan of David Marquet and his Turn the Ship around book that shows on excellent form of leadership but also challenge the way organizations are viewed and managed.

My favourite quote is a simple one:

Move the authority to the information

I like it so much that I’ve already 2 years ago wrote a blog post about that idea, outlining why this is a good thing and how we can save a lot of effort and time in moving the information back and forth.

The other week I realized that there’s other, more subtle and viscous wastes in continuing to move the information to the authority (as we do now). In this post I will describe what that is and how to avoid it.

This is another post in the impromptu series “Marcus explains his tweets in more detail”.

In this post I wanted to talk a little realization that I’ve grown into the last couple of years

There are no best practices is knowledge work.Only good practices and context when they apply. Learn principles-adjust and develop practices

— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) September 23, 2016

It might sound obvious at first (or not) - but I see many signs of that we, especially in the agile community, do the opposite. Let’s see if I can explain my thinking or if I make a fool out of myself - that alone might be worth reading this. Lets go!

I’ve from time to time said things like:

No heroes - is a great starting point to make process improvements

— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) September 20, 2016

but at the same time I think that it’s a good thing to:

Stand back and let people be awesome

In this post I wanted to try to sort these two separate statements out and see where the common ground for them are.

I’m re-reading the Toyota Kata book right now I had forgotten how much it influenced my thinking. If you haven’t read it - go and do that now. Don’t read this post - read the book. I won’t mind.

Toyota Kata is what the author, Mike Rother, calls the mindset and practices that Toyota employs to get continuous improvement to work. Note that Toyota themselves might not recognize the term Toyota Kata, because it’s just how they do.

The book is filled with wonderful stories that shows clearly about how the Toyota mindset influence every aspect about the continuous improvement work there.

In this post I wanted to relate one such story that I meet so often in my daily work and reason a little bit why Toyota (and other lean organizations of course) navigates out of those problems with ease. Whereas I get stuck again and again.

The other week I attended a course that introduced a lean and agile mindset to a group of leaders in a company. My role was to sit back and observe (and to shoot in some of my experience during the training) - here’s one thing I observed.

At one point in time, after we’ve been through the agile manifesto and the principles, and finally the principles of Lean Software development a high ranking manager next to me raised his voice and said:

This all sounds very good. I buy all of it. Its common sense. But the one thing that I don’t get is why we realize this now. We are doing something very different than this now - have we been stupid before?

The discussion that followed was very fruitful and the people in the room learned a lot. But I wanted to go...

Have you ever said something profound and deep?

No - me neither… or rather not on purpose. Sometimes though, when I look back I both realize that some things I said was actually pretty good - and also that I didn’t really understand it when I said it.

I wanted to share such a moment with you and then explain why I think it was actually pretty good.

In this post I suggest that you should:

Lead like all the people in your team/org/companies are volunteers