Just as I thought I've mastered truly agile approach to product management, I noticed myself slipping back to old bad practices: not delivering user value that can be validated by the end user at the end of the sprint.
My scrum team has recently delivered a large epic over several sprints. While I helped the team to break down the original large story (epic) into smaller stories that could fit into each sprint, I could not convince myself to demonstrate what the team has developed at the end of the first sprints to our customers. I doubted our team's work, while instrumental in laying the foundation for the ultimately delivered value, would generate enough interest or even appreciation among our end users.
On one hand, the ground work delivered at the early stages is just too low level (think of plumbing) for many end users, often lacking visible end user facing benefits. On the other hand, I was wondering if prematurely exposing incomplete value package would expose flaws in existing products customers may be unaware of and cause them to doubt what they have instead of appreciate what's coming.
I also noticed I am not alone facing the pressure to concel my yteam's progress, and skip the end of sprint demo. Other Product Owners sometimes tend to avoid showing incomplete features, hoping instead to delight customers and get rave reviews for well thought out, polished features shown to customers at the end of several sprints worth of effort.
Doesn't this push us back to the old dark age of waterfall?
What do you do to avoid falling into the same trap?
My scrum team has recently delivered a large epic over several sprints. While I helped the team to break down the original large story (epic) into smaller stories that could fit into each sprint, I could not convince myself to demonstrate what the team has developed at the end of the first sprints to our customers. I doubted our team's work, while instrumental in laying the foundation for the ultimately delivered value, would generate enough interest or even appreciation among our end users.
On one hand, the ground work delivered at the early stages is just too low level (think of plumbing) for many end users, often lacking visible end user facing benefits. On the other hand, I was wondering if prematurely exposing incomplete value package would expose flaws in existing products customers may be unaware of and cause them to doubt what they have instead of appreciate what's coming.
I also noticed I am not alone facing the pressure to concel my yteam's progress, and skip the end of sprint demo. Other Product Owners sometimes tend to avoid showing incomplete features, hoping instead to delight customers and get rave reviews for well thought out, polished features shown to customers at the end of several sprints worth of effort.
Doesn't this push us back to the old dark age of waterfall?
What do you do to avoid falling into the same trap?
