Coaching the product Owner
The scrum master responsibilities don’t stop at coaching the Development team. It is crucial that the scrum master acknowledge their role in also coaching Product Owners. Even if the product owners are at a higher or more senior level than a scrum master, there are several ways to help product owners see their product vision, help them with backlog prioritization, keeping the customer in mind and writing manageable user stories.
How can a scrum master coach the product owner:
- Set up a monthly Product owner forum or touch base meetings
- Each month, cover a different coaching subject. Here are some I’ve introduced:
Realizing your customer, discuss the use of personnas, there is a plug in in some of the online tools (azure dv ops ) for creating personnas within PBIs. This way the Product owner Is keeping their customer in mind while writing the user story and the development team has the persona within the user stories and keeping the customer forward and front - How to write better user stories using the INVEST criteria which helps POs learn how to break user stories into small measurable and testable user stories
- Writing user stories, focusing on the template of as user, I want to create this to achieve this benefit
- How to push back when requests come in from stakeholders and focus on priorities
- Functional Criteria: Identify specific user tasks, functions or business processes that must be in place. A functional criterion might be “A user is able to access a list of available reports.” A non-functional criterion might be “Edit buttons and Workflow buttons comply with the Site Button Design.”
- Non-functional Criteria: Identify specific non-functional conditions the implementation must meet, such as design elements. A non-functional criterion might be “Edit buttons and Workflow buttons comply with the Site Button Design.”
- Performance Criteria: If specific performance is critical to the acceptance of a user story, it should be included. This is often measured as a response time, and should be spelled out as a threshold such as “1-2 seconds for a query response.”
- Setting good acceptance criteria, intent because a user story is not complete without them