Diagnosing Dysfunction Using the Product Backlog

 

What do human bodies, cars, and backlogs have in common? It is important to check all three of these items regularly to stay fit and healthy. The Product Backlog—an important Scrum artifact—lists the stories that the team needs to work on. This includes any potential work that has not been done by the team/organization and that may be one of the parts of the product. One of the Product Owner's responsibilities is to ensure that the team does not lag.

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The DoD (Definition Of Done) can tell a lot about what is important for a team to produce an increment of the potentially delivered product. However, the Product backlog is insightful in ways we've never thought of before and has become one of the most important tools we use to train our team.

Look at your product backlog. Growth rings and a perfect example are good for showing the collaboration between the product owner and the development team. A strong Scrum team shares an environment, so make sure you capture this subtle balance in your product backlog.

If you're having trouble collaborating between companies and developers, you'll probably see a product backlog. Like shorter rings during a drought, ordering a product shows what work was done to create it and how the different personalities of the team members closely work with each other.

In various cases, you may notice that the product owners have distanced themselves from the product development team, resulting in a very business-friendly product lag: all stories are customer-centric and do not pay attention to the project’s technical architecture. Team input was ignored or worse, not requested.

The team members are in constant communication, though this isn't the case for the other team in charge of the project. They collaborate with each other and deliver a product that differentiates from their competitor's, but they don’t get the chance to deal with technical debts or do on their own thoughts.

When the product backlog is focused too much on developers, you are looking at products that are full of technical stories that might be difficult for users to decipher. The stories are unlikely to make sense to a product owner who trusts technical experts who know what they are doing, even if they have very little idea of ​​what they are doing.

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There are likely strong personalities in the development team that has crossed the line from deciding how a product add-on will be delivered to what will be included in a product add-on.

Of course, there are also a thousand changes among them, each with its own story of how the Scrum team collaborates and discovers the requirements to produce the product.

However, if you know what you are looking for, you can look at the growth tree rings of your products and find signs of problems that are preventing your team from reaching its full potential. The product backlog is useful for trainers, too. Not only can you use it to help identify the biggest challenges facing your team, but you can also use it to plan training sessions that address those challenges.

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