Vanessa Sant'Anna

Last week I took a CSPO training with Michel Goldenberg. It wasn't a by-the-book course but a customization for Globo.com. Before this I had a rather romantic view of the Product Owner role and even tough that has flown out of the window, I still think that this is the most exciting role in the Scrum framework.

I always knew that the Product Owner was responsible for maximizing the return of investment (ROI). Since I never got to experience playing this role, it all seemed a little hazy, I couldn't really grasp it.

First, what is ROI? ROI is how much business value you can deliver given a teams velocity. Oh, okay. How about velocity? In an over simplified way it is how many story points/complexity a team can deliver in an iteration. I won't get into how it changes or what complexity really is. If you get your business value and divide it by the complexity you'll have the return of investment.

So how can you maximize the ROI? All you have is two numbers: business value and complexity. You can't randomly change your business value, that will probably get you building the wrong product. You don't get a say in the complexity either, that's given by the team. The team estimates the complexity to build a piece of product based on their technical skills and business knowledge.

Given that you have the right team to build your product, that they have the required technical skills and knowledge to solve problems, we are left with the business knowledge. How does a team get to know more about the business and the product? They can learn once they start working on it and also with the amount of information the PO gives them. Here is the hidden gem of succeeding. Give your team enough information so they can perceive the problem as something less complex. If they do that they'll be able to build a part of it. They will learn some and you will bring more information. The complexity gets reduced and they are ready to build for more pieces of product. This process is as iterative as all the rest.

I'll give you a real life ROI maximization experience that has nothing to do with software or business for that matter. Do you know the Weight Watchers points program? It's very simple. Based on your height and age you get a certain amount of points to eat per day. They have a list with all the food and the points per portion. You can eat anything you want within your daily "velocity". Now, you don't wanna be hungry, right? So what you do is prioritize the food that coasts less and won't leave you starving. When you do that you're maximizing your menu, your ROI. Simple, huh? Weight Watchers has an uber-agile process when you come to think of it.

The Product Owner is responsible to help the team understand the problem so they can tackle the complexity. The Product Owner has to be able to communicate very well with the team, be there for them. The Product Owner has be able to get more information from the stakeholders. The Product Owner has to keep his backlog alive otherwise he may not know that the product building is actually done.