Here are some of the challenges with the past few weeks Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to really reflect over how things went and try to gather my own thoughts about it and nail down some lessons. I can’t say that it went great maybe, but I'm still pretty satisfied with the result so far. So that was the plan, and this is what I have been struggling with for the past weeks (plus celebrating Christmas and New Year :-)). Oh, and of course, we’d be forced to rely much more on face-to-face communication between the team and the Product Manager, which would be great: “two people by a whiteboard” is always a many times more efficient method of transferring information than by document, right? This would somehow force the Product Manager to skip details and thus not try to think of everything up front. My idea was to skip the “detail specification” step alltogether and jump straight from the vision to User Stories, and thereby save time by having the Product Manager produce User Stories directly which later could be prioritized and further broken down. In this case, with this development project being such a large one (a new product, with so many functions), it would simply have been an overwhelming task for the Product Manager to rely on our traditioinal approach and write all those "function specs" up front – at least considering the usual level of detail in those spec documents. I’ve been wanting to find a better and more Agile way of moving from “The vision inside the head of the Product Manager” to “Something that the team understands, which can be prioritized and brought into the Sprint Planning meetings”. I have felt that this goes against my core attitude/rule-of-thumb “Never document more than that you have to ask to understand” and that it is pretty "un-scrum". My problem with that approach was (and is) that the Product Manager usually (for whatever reason) spent alot of time writing these “functionality specs”. Our traditional method for this was to have the Product Manager (Customer) produce a written description of each feature that he wanted, and then he would hand that over to the Development Department where we (“we” being the team and the Scrum Product Owner: as you may know we use the somewhat controversial “Product Owner Proxy” construction in our organization) would take ownership of that written “spec” and break it down into User Stories that were prioritized and later estimated and delivered in priority order. I.e.: we’ve been involved in getting a (very large) project “vision” down into a set of stories. The reason is that I’ve been in a phase here where we’re ramping up a project and I have been heavily involved in trying to form an initial backlog with an initial set of reasonably meaningful User Stories for that project. The past few weeks have been hectic, and I haven’t really had the time to post anything new in a while.
But for the record, credits to Henrik Kniberg for the “…from the trenches”-bit :-).
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