Enable a Product Team…

to self-manage its feature and story refinement process effectively and transparently

Situation

The client was using the Scaled Agile methodology to produce features for teams and Product Owners to break out into stories to feed sprint development. While the players were reasonably well bought into the process and methodology, the feature refinement often occurred too late in the process, requiring teams to take on ill-defined work (sometimes a one-line description for a multi-sprint feature). While the product managers and product owners worked diligently to capture sufficient detail for a well-run agile process, the challenges in defining sufficient detail, ensuring collaboration between product, architecture, and development teams proved difficult to manage.

Objective

Provide a process and associated guidance for the product definition teams that enables PO’s to find and review features as they become ready for review, enables collaboration and cadence for feature refinement between Product Managers and Product Owners, and provides clear metrics for the refinement process showing progress as features are readied and reviewed. Any approach we took would need to provide a PO/Team-based view of the feature candidates for the upcoming 3-month Program Increment (PI) and identify features that were at risk to “fall between the cracks”. Finally, we needed to do all this while facilitating a transition from a custom spreadsheet-based view of upcoming PI workload to a data-based approach grounded in the agile work management tool. We were using Azure DevOps, but wanted an approach that would work in any of the usual tools (Rally, Jira, VSTS, Azure DevOps, etc)

Action

Along with the RTE, development managers, and scrum masters, I worked over the course of multiple program increments to take iterative steps forward by…
introducing new ideas in the refinement management process and …
in some cases getting consensus and codifying good ideas that emerged from the other groups as they worked independently to improve their part of the process.
We focused on creating all the capabilities we needed (see objective above) while maintaining the simplest approach in terms of process and changes to the agile work management tool

Result

What emerged was a robust process and cadence for writing features, getting cross-functional feedback from architecture and product owners, allowing teams to review, question, and refine features and stories organically (and transparently) as the program increment progressed rather than doing it all in a crush in the final hectic sprint (or two) immediately preceding PI Planning for the following increment. As part of this I also produced a rubric [TODO: add link to product owner rubric] used by myself and other product owners to keep on track in the ongoing refinement process.

One of the great things about our simple approach is that it transparently captured Q&A conversations between PM, POs, Architecture, and Teams. It also identified key players for each feature - the assigned Product manager, Product Owner, and the progress of cross-team review and commitment. We were able to easily build queries to enable a fluid process for multiple teams to review and pose questions and easy facilitation of refinement meetings to address areas where PO or teams lack clarity.

Not using SAFE? This process is also a fit (perhaps a better fit) for traditional agile when scaled to support multiple teams working on an integrated solution. The key is emphasizing the importance of refinement activities as soon as possible after the initial definition is authored, providing rapid feedback from teams and architecture to POs and business sponsors so that the team as a whole can arrive a a clearly understood shared understanding of the acceptance criteria. Feel free to reach out to me if you have more questions.

Feel free to contact me for more detail on the process we used and how it could be implemented by adopting just a few basic conventions and guidelines on use of the agile work management tool