Product Ownership | Product Management | Scrum Master
Product owners play a critical role in solution development and delivery, having ownership over the backlog, user stories, prioritization of stories for sprint planning, and situational awareness about a product’s users and competitors. More than anything, the product owner must manage expectations and continuously reign in influences that left unaddressed will quickly veer a product development effort off course - impacting budget, schedule, and quality of the delivered solution.
Bluphrog excels at both product ownership and scrum master tasks, managing vision, backlog, and overseeing that development and devops teams adhere to the agile processes and principles that have been determined to work for each specific engagement.
Agile SDLC Approach to Product Management and Delivery
While each team and each engagement involves the establishment their specific flavor of agile SDLC, there is a general set of phases that a team cycles through iteratively and must address.
Feature Prioritization & Backlog Management
After managing many product backlogs across multiple projects, Bluphrog created and evolved a data-driven “product feature/backlog prioritization analyzer” approach to inform feature and backlog prioritization.
While each engagement may have unique criteria that should be considered in terms of the risk/reward status of each proposed feature (adjusting the values in the analyzer sliders) - making an objective assessment of key features helps inform that prioritization.
Bluphrog works closely with each customer to ensure the right assessment criteria is being used to appropriately weigh decision making.
Being Agile with Agile: Lessons from Real-Life Experience
The whole IT world seems to have adopted agile methodologies in some form. And believe me - there are many flavors and degrees agile implementation. While I could write a book based on my experience detailing the real-life pros and cons of agile methodologies (generally I’m a fan), and hurdles around things like antiquated contract language that derails the adoption of a many agile concepts - my experience is that teams need to be agile with agile. Bluphrog has driven many successful agile efforts both as a Scrum Master and a Product Owner, and works to align contract language and traditional concepts around accountability (remember traceability matrices and multi-hundred page requirement specification documents?) with approaches that adopt as much goodness from agile as the engagement will allow. Below is an example of an artifact created by Bluphrog to clarify and define the how-to for a specific customer engagement. In this case, the situation called for a version of scaled agile methodologies, where disparate technology teams came under the coordinated governance of a single management entity.
