Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

Two, the Product Owner has to be empowered to make decisions.

the Product Owner is under pressure from a lot of different stakeholders, both internal and external, and has to be able to hold firm. The Product Owner should be responsible for outcomes, but let the team make their own decisions.

Three, the Product Owner has to be available to the team, to explain what needs to be done and why.

The Product Owner has to be reliable, consistent, and available.

This is one of the reasons I rarely recommend that CEOs or other senior executives be Product Owners. They just don’t have the time the team needs.

Four, the Product Owner needs to be accountable for value.

The key is to decide what the measure of value is and hold the Product Owner accountable for delivering more of it.

The battle was decided not by what the machine could do, but by how fast observation was translated into action.

By getting constant input from whoever is getting value from what you’re doing—be it the person clicking the Buy button on Amazon, the parishioners of your church, the children in a classroom, or someone trying on a dress—you’re in a position to constantly adjust your strategy and more quickly succeed.

OODA loop. That’s short for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

“Observe”

moving outside of yourself so as to see the whole picture—not merely your own point of view.

“Orient”

reflects not only how you see the world and your place in it, but what world you’re capable of seeing.

The combination of Observation and Orientation leads to a “Decision,” which leads to “Action.”

What Scrum does, by delivering a working increment, is give the Product Owner the ability to see how much value that increment creates, how people react to it.

The key is to look for what slices actually hold value—enough value that you can get real feedback on them and react in real time.

The key is not to have a fully established design at the beginning but, rather, to make a functional prototype, then see what you can improve. And then, having improved it, to make the next prototype and improve that one. The idea is that the sooner you have some real feedback, the faster you can make a better car.

What is the absolute least I can build and still deliver some value to a customer?

fallback, if you can’t put something before an external customer, is to identify an internal customer—for example, the Product Owner—who can act in lieu of the public.

Orientation isn’t just a state you’re in; it’s a process. You’re always orienting.

That’s the way it is, guys.

The key thing to remember is that the order is always in flux.

not concentrating both your resources and your mental energies, you thin them out to irrelevancy.

I call this a “Minimum Viable Product,” or MVP. This should be the thing you show to the public for the first time. How effective does it have to be? Well, it should actually work, though to a person who has been working on it, it may seem kind of embarrassing.

Government is not only how we organize the public sphere—how we get roads and police and courts and the DMV—it’s also how we formalize who we are as a people. It is a codification of who we believe we are.

Shippable product,” in their case, means actionable changes to policy. It doesn’t have to be a thing; it just has to be something, anything, that creates value.

Scrum is the code of the anti-cynic. Scrum is not wishing for a better world, or surrendering to the one that exists. Rather, it is a practical, actionable way to implement change.