Balancing Strategic and Tactical Work
In our experience, many product owners don’t have time to balance the strategic responsibilities with the tactical work needed to sustain a healthy flow of delivery. A time-pressed product owner has the following options:
- Do it all (sometimes not very well, causing bottlenecks and delays).
- Establish a product owner council headed by an über-product owner, with strategic responsibilities distributed among the members.
- Get help with the tactical analysis work. Rely on the folks on the delivery team to do much of the business analysis, and retain strategic and tactical decision-making authority.
- Retain strategic responsibilities and delegate the tactical work to someone else (e.g., a domain-savvy business analyst). This delegation should be explicitly and transparently communicated to all stakeholders.
- Some combination of the above.
Beyond Roles to Goals
After exploring and evaluating requirements options, the goal of analysis is to allocate the highest-value requirements for delivery. No matter how roles are classified on your agile team, that business analysis work is vital. It is best done collaboratively, leveraging everyone’s skills to build and maintain a shared understanding of product needs.
Above all, it’s the goal, and not the role, that matters.
Resources
Product Owner Role
- Pichler, Roman. Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love. Addison-Wesley, 2010.
- Schwaber, Ken, “Product Owners Not Proxies.”
Agile Analysis
- Gottesdiener, Ellen and Mary Gorman, “Agile Planning and Analysis: Synergizing to Deliver Value,” Better Software, May/June 2011.
- Gottesdiener, Ellen and Mary Gorman, "Slicing Requirements for Agile Success," Better Software, July/August 2010.
- Gottesdiener, Ellen, "Agile Business Analysis in Flow: The Work of the Agile Analyst (Part 1and Part 2)," Modern Analyst, May 2009.
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About the author
Ellen Gottesdiener, Founder and Principal with EBG Consulting, is an internationally recognized facilitator, coach, trainer, and speaker. She is an expert in Agile product and project management practices, product envisioning and roadmapping, business analysis and requirements, retrospectives, and collaboration.
In addition to co-authoring Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis with Mary Gorman, Ellen is author of two acclaimed books: Requirements by Collaboration and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger.
View articles, Ellen’s tweets and blog, free eNewsletter, and a variety of useful practitioner resources on EBG's website, ebgconsulting.com.
About the author
Mary Gorman, CBAP, CSM, and VP of quality and delivery at EBG Consulting, helps business and technical teams collaborate to deliver products your customers value and need. Mary works with global clients, speaks at industry conferences, and writes on requirements topics for the business analysis community. She is currently co-authoring a book with Ellen Gottesdiener on essential agile requirements practices.
