Product Owners forum

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

It is so great to have some slack time, as you can let your mind get off a bit from your own coaching activities and learn from others. It is also great as sooner or later you will connect the dots back to implement those insights and even write a post on it 🙂

At AgileSparks we allocate some of this slack for a Gemba walk. Today, for example, I was lucky to join my colleague in a kickoff meeting of a distributed PO forum. Leading a remote session is a challenging situation by itself, as well as working with a wide range of audiences or with distributed coaches. But let’s tackle them one by one. I promise that at the end you will also get the how to run your first distributed PO forum tips as well.

What I would like to start with is the Why. Why initiate a PO forum? What are the benefits? Many times there are POs that are working on different products, maybe on different release trains, with different competencies or expertise, so why bother?

Well, if you set it once or participated already, you probably know the answer – It is so enlightening to have a peer group that gets together as a community and shares knowledge across POs, supports each other in their PO role, gets alignments on the organization way of work and raises questions, concerns, challenges, and brainstorm together.  You don’t need to wait till your organization gets stabilized with its Agile implementation before you kick off your PO forum. It is much better to get started from the beginning. The topics will most likely change as also the frequency, but as soon as you start with this routine in your journey the sooner you’ll get the fruits that will result from this collaboration.

The topics can vary from roles and responsibilities, POs role within the Agile ceremonies and the product lifecycle, Planning and pre-planning, the DoD, product and team backlog, user stories and splitting patterns, and can continue with dipper dilemmas resulting from the organizational structure, interface with other stakeholders, short vs long term decisions, understanding the MVP and story mapping, working with tools and other working routines and so forth. The best part is that you discuss it together, get a shared understanding of it, get exposed to others’ experiences and best practices, and keep this routine also when your Agile coach stepped out.

So, what are the tips to facilitate it? and how to run your first distributed PO forum?

Let’s start with the preparations:

  • For a remote session, you need a good video conference setup. First, ensure you have a good-quality of video and audio and a good and stable network to support it. Get enough time before the meeting to ensure all is set. As obvious as it sounds, this is the one step so many repeatedly fail into.
  • Ensure you know how to host the meeting and share your slides, digital board, or any other application you will use.
  • Get familiar with a virtual board. This board can be used to park topics that the team raised during the meeting but will be discussed later on, so you’d like to visualize these. It can also be used when you’d like everyone to bring their dilemmas and current challenges/gaps and then classify them together, prioritize and discuss them. This is a great way to bring everyone on board, get everyone’s ideas, visualize them and work on them as a team.
  • If you have an Agile coach also on the remote site, ensure you are aligned on the agenda and the facilitation. Enable shared facilitation to encourage collaboration, respect, and trust.

At a kickoff of a forum, you would like first to:

  • Get everyone to get introduced. There are many practices on how to run a short intro and how to share expectations and it will depend also on the time you have. Remember to timebox your agenda items.
  • Have a good working agreement for the forum, an agreement that everyone will own and follow and will stop the line when the team crossed it.
  • Present the agenda.
  • Agile product ownership in a nutshell provides a good baseline to start a discussion. Identify what you would like to do more, what you are currently missing, what you don’t understand, and what you don’t want to adopt. It provides a good platform from which you can collect on the virtual board the team dilemmas and gaps.
  • Collect the topics, review and classify them together, and prioritize them. Now you have an initial backlog of the PO forum to start with.
  • Address the high-rated topics and continue tracking and refining your PO forum backlog as you continue.
  • Summarize and track any decisions and/or experiments resulting from the forum and follow up on them at the next meeting of the forum. One of the activities we encourage is that POs will join other team’s ceremonies and see how their PO walk through a sprint planning or a review meeting or any other activity, so they can get exposed to other practices and provide feedback to each other.

In the end, this forum is a great supporting team when one can understand that his/her challenges may be common and get tips and best practices from others to experiment and implement, as well as a great platform for long-term discussions, improvements, and continuance learning.

Categories:

Tags:

Agile Games
Professional Scrum Master
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Professional Scrum Product Owner
SAFe DevOps
Nexus
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Lean Agile Management
LeSS
Quality Assurance
Implementing SAFe
Kanban Kickstart Example
Lean Agile Organization
Scrum Values
Introduction to ATDD
Software Development Estimation
Agile in the Enterprise
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Change Management
Manage Budget Creation
Jira Cloud
Scrum Master Role
Scrum.org
ARTs
Limiting Work in Progress
Nexus vs SAFe
Continuous Delivery
Introduction to Test Driven Development
Agile Exercises
Self-organization
Kanban Game
Scrum With Kanban
The Agile Coach
AI Artificial Intelligence
Agile Risk Management
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Games and Exercises
Sprint Retrospectives
Continuous Integration
ALM Tools
Legacy Code
Agile Release Management
Agile Development
Risk-aware Product Development
IT Operations
System Integration Environments
Software Development
Coaching Agile Teams
Agile Testing Practices
Lean Risk Management
Jira
Continuous Planning
The Kanban Method
Agility
Built-In Quality
Agile Outsourcing
Atlaassian
Agile Games and Exercises
System Archetypes
Nexus and SAFe
Agile Mindset
RSA
ATDD vs. BDD
speed at scale
QA
Release Train Engineer
Agile Release Planning
Business Agility
Operational Value Stream
Kaizen Workshop
PI Objectives
RTE Role
Kaizen
Agile Community
RTE
What Is Kanban
Agile Product Ownership
Legacy Enterprise
Test Driven Development
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Continuous Deployment
Story Slicing
Planning
lean agile change management
Covid19
Applying Agile Methodology
Scrum
Lean-Agile Budgeting
Managing Projects
ART Success
Agile Delivery
Lean Agile Leadership
Slides
Sprint Planning
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Agile India
Daily Scrum
Releases Using Lean
SAFe Release Planning
Pomodoro Technique
Agile Assembly Architecture
Amdocs
NIT
Large Scale Scrum
Nexus Integration Team
Webinar
Risk Management in Kanban
Lean Agile
Lean Budgeting
Enterprise DevOps
Value Streams
ROI
EOS®
Effective Agile Retrospectives
Agile Marketing
Video
SPC
System Team
Agile Project Management
Agile for Embedded Systems
Systems Thinking
speed @ scale
PI Planning
Scrum Primer
Product Ownership
Advanced Roadmaps
Agile and DevOps Journey
SA
POPM
Program Increment
Code
Agile Contracts Best Practices
WIP
Lean and Agile Techniques
LAB
Scrum and XP
Elastic Leadership
TDD
Spotify
Reading List
BDD
Continuous Improvement
Scaled Agile Framework
Portfolio for Jira
LPM
ScrumMaster Tales
Tips
Development Value Streams
Engineering Practices
Rapid RTC
Nexus and Kanban
Agile Product Development
Achieve Business Agility
Hybrid Work
AgileSparks
ATDD
Risk Management on Agile Projects
Product Management
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Agile Israel Events
Scrum Guide
Iterative Incremental Development
Lean-Agile Software Development
Kanban 101
Agile
Jira Plans
Agile Project
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
An Appreciative Retrospective
Lean Software Development
Process Improvement
Agile Techniques
Agile Basics
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
DevOps
Lean Agile Basics
Lean Startup
Scrum Master
Kanban
Kanban Basics
Presentation
Sprint Iteration
Certified SAFe
Frameworks
Agile Program
SAFe
Artificial Intelligence
Certification
Perfection Game
AgileSparks
Logo

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart