Hey there, Agile Adventurer. Just a quick question. What if, for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best Agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, e-courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world-class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slag with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Fashko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's the Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org forward slash membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org forward slash membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Friday TGIF episode this week with Aliu Adewale. Hey, Aliu. Welcome back. Thank you, Vasco. Happy to be back. So, Aliu, product owner is the focus of our Friday conversation, and we'll talk about great product owners in a minute. But before that, share with us what might have been potentially the worst product owner anti-pattern you've witnessed in your career. uh i'm okay i i think the worst should i say the worst um because this product owner is is not really like i don't know if i should use the word worst but i would say is it was then it was over ambitious you know like when a product owner just want to have everything I think we talked about that earlier in the previous episode where people just want to have everything and they don't know when they need to prioritize. So this product owner always say yes to everything. Everything that comes toward him from the stakeholders, from the business, he always want to put them in the backlog, always want to shuffle it to the team throat all the time. So he's overambitious. He never said no to anything at all. And that really, really in the team. And this is a product owner that never considered. And this was previous in like a few years ago. And, you know, he always comes and bring different features. He never said no to the stakeholders. And this affected the team a lot. This is a product owner that never considered the size of the team, the capacity of the team. Why do you think that happened? Like, was it so that the team was not having planning conversations and raising the flags? Or was it that the product owner was blind to that? Like, why was it that the product owner was not considering the capacity of the team? I think he was blind to that. He was blind to that. And, you know, we have many product owners. They are product owners that always want to say yes to the stakeholders to the business They never want to say no And what they don know is that every yes to something unimportant is a no to what is matter. You know, every yes to what is unimportant is a no to what matters. So, and that always affects the team. So, but let me dig a little bit deeper into that. Was it so that the team wasn't communicating back to the product owner? Hey, if we do this, then we can't do that. Or was it that they were communicating, but it was being ignored? So they were communicating and they were communication, actually. And what's always up most of the time, team setups are important too. you might have a team where someone just want to do their job and go, someone don't want to say no to because it comes from the hub to top to bottom where product owners don't want to say no to the business that are funding it because they want to keep their job and it comes down to the team where some of the team might be on a probation time you know and it's hard for them to say no at that moment. They just be like, okay, whatever we can get done with this, that timeframe, that's fine. Let's just keep going. And most of the time, as well, it lies on the scrum master to how you coach your product owner, when they need to say no, when they need to say yes, you know, because sometimes more is just a noise. It's just a noise. You know, more features don't equal to more values. Most product owners don't know that. They believe like the more features they deliver, the more the stakeholders are going to be happy, the more the business are going to see them as being effective, as being like, oh, you deliver hundreds of features for us within six months. Are they valuable? That should be the question. So sometimes more features don't equal to more values. sometime more. Just like we talked about on Wednesday, right? Like it was the opposite. The more features we want to deliver, the later we deliver, the less value we can extract from what we could have delivered earlier. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's more of like people want to keep their job the way I see it. That's why they find it hard to say no in some sense. And some are overambitious too. It's blind their face like, okay, they have this tracker where they'll be like, in six months, I deliver 200 features. Are these 200 features valuable? Some features are not even useful. On your phone right now, Vasco, you probably don't even use some features on some app. Wow. Yeah. Like maybe 10%. Yeah, maybe 10% of what you have on your app right now. You have your bank app. You probably never ever use some features that day. So more features doesn't equal to more value. Especially if they delay, because when you delay, you prevent people from extracting value from what you could have delivered earlier. Absolutely. Absolutely. And market change. So as a product owner, I always tell my product owner, like, you know, focus on what matter right now. Things can change Government can change policy tomorrow What we have last three months is different from what we have right now And it going to be different next three months So focus on what matters right now Absolutely Focus on what matters right now And talking about that, what matters right now is what great product owners do. So Aliu, share with us the best product owner you've ever worked with. How did they work? Oh, this particular one is a great guy. Great guy. And I worked with him a few years ago. And this guy utilized, I'm not sure what the name of the tools he used, but he will go into the JIRA board, pull out a story, and record himself and explain the user stories, acceptance criterias, the end goal, when we need to deliver them. one by one and record himself prior to backlog refinement. So then, back then, we used to have like refinement like twice a week. And this guy would go in there a day two or two days earlier just to share his thoughts on the user stories, explain it, record. Like this was before Loom. You know, we have Loom now in Jira and other Loom video. This was before Loom. And he would record himself, talk about that. That was very helpful, so helpful for the team. Because the team had the opportunity back then to actually watch his video, have questions, add comments. It makes backlog refinement look like walking it back. And this guy will also present. He will also attend the refinement. Regardless, he already sent video in advance, right? He's still going to participate. it. You never miss a comment in the Jira section to add a comment, follow up, collaborating. Apart from utilizing that tools, video tools to support the team, to help, to be transparent, to tell them what they need to do, what the end goal looks like, this guy also I've wanted, I call negotiation skills. When done in the middle of a sprint, this guy has never had anything into the sprint without consulting the team first. Negotiate with them. Okay, if we had these two requests from the leadership, what's going to be the impact? Do we need to take something out? Like a scope creep, right? Do we need to take something out? Or can we accommodate it? If no, he's not going to force it to the team throat. He's going to go back to the leadership and say, if we had this, this is going to be the consequence. Are you guys okay with that? This is a guy that over-communicated everything. That was the best, like has been the best experience for me in terms of deal. And I think that one of the perhaps most obvious consequences of that willingness to communicate things up front and, as you said, over-communicate is that it sets expectations and it allows for the feedback to come in and to help make the best decision possible in that context, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. So this was the great product owner. We're getting close to the end, Alio. But before we go, do share with us, where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing? People can find more about me on www And that the title of my book by the way which I talk about Agile principles 12 principles of Agile, one by one, chapter by chapter. And I mirror it to day-to-day life, how people live in. Like some of us are actually living Agile without even realizing it. We don't even know we live in Agile because of the big, big name, big, big vocabulary. We thought like, this is big for me, but we're actually living the life. So that's the title of the book, Agile in Plain Sight. And where people can actually find me is www.agileinplainsight.com. Absolutely. We'll put the link to that in the show notes. Make sure that people find Aliu there. And there's, I'm sure, a feedback form that they can use to get in touch with you, right, Aliu? Absolutely. Absolutely. my email is there. You can reach out to me. Let's talk about agile. Let's talk about leadership. Let's talk about enterprise collaboration, Scrum. I'm open to conversation. Absolutely. And learn from each other because that's how we grow as a community. Aliu, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge. Thank you so much, Vasco. I'm happy to be here. And thanks. Thank you for the work you do for the community as well. Thanks so much. All right, I hope you liked this episode. But before you hit next episode, here's the deal. This podcast is powered by people like you. The members who wanted more than just inspiration. They wanted real tools and real connection to people who are practicing Agile every day. We're talking access to over 700 hours of Agile gold. CTO level strategy talks, summit keynotes, live workshops, e-courses, deep dive interviews, books. 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