The VOC, but who is the customer?

A recent post encouraging proactive steps to gather the VOC leaves the issue of “who is the customer?” well alone, since a generic answer would be vague, it is heavily context sensitive. Many good ideas are presented here.

An intriguing point made here is that, these are solutions to a situation “…particularly where there is little time to do any early user research”. You must consider what is underlying such a train of thought carefully.   I hear this sentiment sometimes and it is almost surely leading to building of the wrong product! So lot of activity will ensue, but progress in terms of generating ROI may is certainly not ensured! In other words it is a case of leap before you look. This is not to say what’s written in the above mentioned post is wrong, or that it is recommending ignoring user research. It just is trying to work around a poor decision.

As usual since my blog is about Scrum,  here I’ll try to relate this situation with the product owner’s role. To cut a long story short, it’s the PO’s responsibility to bring the VOC into the project. Identifying and engaging with customer(s) or potential customers and the difficult balancing act that may be needed is in the PO’s court. Again it is difficult to provide general advice that is practical but it certainly helps to make as much activity around this as visible as possible. The transparency of such interactions will mean a very significant reduction in dysfunctional behaviour. So as far as the teams are concerned the PO is the customer, albeit,  one who follows the rules of Scrum.

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What can be done when the PO isn’t empowered?

A fairly common situation in organizations is the presence of a PO without authority. It is common for a BA to play this role, and mainly due to the mistaken belief that functional knowledge is  the only criteria for a PO. Also the term ScrumMaster suggesting an all important person in a move to Scrum, contributes to this thinking. As in many things the best course of action is to preempt this situation by educating the rest of the organization (before) the start of Sprint about the roles of SM and PO. Once the realization set in, that the SM is not responsible for the delivery on a sprint to sprint basis, and in terms of delivering the product to the customers, people outside will turn to the PO. The PO will then slowly take on a stronger and more meaningful role, suffused with responsibility.  In my experience, coaching project teams and organizations, this take some time. The first level of understanding come about in 3 to 4 sprints, but deeper understanding typically takes a release or two (maybe 3 to 6  months). What one can do to make this more visible:

1. Re-iterate that Scrum is a radically different system of running software projects.

2. Encourage interaction between team and PO, as well as PO and external customers/client.

3. Explain to all concerned that while the team is largely responsible for “building the system right” every sprint, the PO is reponsible for making available “The right system”. While the team is collectively responsible every sprint, the release to the customers is the responsibility of the PO.

4. In addition for a release the PO is ultimately responsible for delivery of the “right system right”, in other words the appropriate system which is shippable (i.e of high quality)