For two days Scrum Masters, Product Owners and some representatives of developers met at ePages headquarter Hamburg to discuss about the status quo of how agile ePages is. In particular, we clarified the roles of POs and SMs at ePages, we talked about learnings and what could be improved.
First day
We started off in the morning with drawing so called “Role Maps”. In such a map, you draw your connections to other roles or groups in the company. You also indicate, how much energy you dedicate into those connections and what’s the benefit. It was interesting to see, how different some connections of roles are at ePages, depending on the company location you are working at.
Afterwards, we quickly checked, how agile we think ePages is. The agile coach, who moderated our agile hackathon, presented us the Agile Manifesto. We voted from 1 (not true) to 10 (totally true) if we think that the four directives apply for ePages. While we were pretty close together and agreed on a high number for “Working products are more important than documentation”, our opinions differed with regards to the other three directives. Here again, it depended on the team and the corresponding projects. But in the total overview, we are on a pretty good way.
Responsibilities
The afternoon was dedicated to really understand and agree on the responsibilities of the roles of Product Owners and Scrum Masters. Since the views on the roles differed a lot depending on the company location, this caused some productive discussions. In the end, we came up with the following definitions of the roles for ePages:
Product Owner
Responsibilities
- Defining the product vision
- Stakeholder management
- Creating epics and stories, prioritising and managing the backlog
- Creating the roadmap (together with stakeholders and developers)
- Communicating the business value of epics
Skills
- Knowledge about the product
- Courage to say “No”
- Communication skills - not only talking, but also listening skills
- Empowering the team
- Write stories/epics from a user’s perspective
Deliverables
- Prioritised backlog, user stories, roadmap
- Defined MVP and product increments for big projects
- Receive information from stakeholders required for development (e.g. documentation, login data…)
Testimonial
Ferdinand Piech (for creating and following a big product vision)
Expectations
- Respect the team’s definition of done
- Trust in the team
- Ensuring that the user stories fulfil the definition of ready
- Clear product vision and being able to communicate it
Scrum Masters
Responsibilities - Skills - Expectations
- Promote Scrum throughout the company (definition/persistence)
- Spokesman of the team (organisation, let team focus on development)
- Mediating in the team (empathy)
- Guiding on process improvement (teaching)
- Individual coaching of team members (coaching skills)
Deliverables
- Highly performant team (technical, collaboration)
- Alignment of personal goals of developers and team goals
- Process
Testimonial
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Second day
The second day began with a session about magic estimation. Most of us already knew that, but it was a nice refreshment. We also had short sessions about measuring the success of the Scrum Master work, impediment backlogs, transition team and pilot team. The most important point on this day was to create a backlog of tasks we wanted to take out of the workshop.
Backlog after the workshop
Here are the most important tasks we are going to tackle during the next weeks:
- Setting up a transition team
- Improve cooperation within the Scrum Master team (get a Scrum Master of Scrum Masters or coach from the outside)
- Find out, if we can create a pilot team as future lab at ePages
- Design Thinking workshops
- Servant leadership training for SMs, POs and Management
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