#productowner — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #productowner, aggregated by home.social.
-
In a Wizard of Oz MVP, you present what looks to the end user like a fully functional product. Behind the scenes, it's just people doing the work.
The most famous example is Zappos (originally Shoesite). Like any good Lean startup, they needed to test their riskiest assumption: would anyone buy shoes online? You can't test fit, feel, or quality through a screen. Rather than spend millions building a fulfillment center, founder Tony Hsieh put up a website that sold shoes, then fulfilled orders manually by buying them at local stores.
Airbnb did something similar: the founders visited early hosts' homes, took professional photos, and listed them on the site themselves. When a guest booked, the founders handled the details in the background. Both were testing the same riskiest assumption: is it safe to buy or rent over the internet?
Build a realistic front end, leave out the back end, and iterate quickly as you see how people actually use it. To the end user, it has to look real. Measure whatever you'd normally measure in a live product: does the user buy, rent, or take the key action?
Pros: cheap, cheerful. Cons: consistency is hard to maintain doing repetitive tasks manually, and it doesn't scale. If demand overwhelms you early, you may need to shut the door temporarily and build the real thing. Remember, you built throw-away code. Don't build on top of it.
Wizard of Oz is one of my favourite MVP techniques.
https://agilepainrelief.com/glossary/wizard-of-oz/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=archive-reshare
-
A Scrum by Example teaching story, set in our fictional World's Smallest Online Bookstore.
About a third of the way down the Product Backlog there's a Story: "As Julia (a Real Estate Agent and frequent book buyer), I want to buy a gift card to thank a fantastic recent client." Estimated at 20, so the team agrees it needs to be split.
As the Scrum Team discusses the Story, they ask Product Owner Paula several clarifying questions. How will the recipient redeem the gift card? Already covered in a later story, also estimated at 20. Printable or electronic? Electronic for now. Fancy graphics and messaging? Nice to have, not essential for v1. Refillable or one-time use? Undecided.
Seeing that refillable gift cards cost 8 Story Points, Paula says, "That's expensive for the value I get," and pushes it down in priority. She also notices the combined cost of the $10 gift card Story and the alternate-denominations Story is 18 Points, quite large. She asks if it would be cheaper to allow any amount. The Team comes back with an estimate of 8: still more complex than the basic Story, but far less than 18.
All of this leads Paula to realize that being able to use a gift card is as important as buying one.
The leading cause of poor Sprint Planning, and therefore crappy Sprints, is team members not understanding the User Stories they're working on. Refinement exists to make sure the Product Backlog is clear and understood by everyone before the Sprint, not just to make it look good.
Scrum by Example is a narrative-style blog series designed to help people think through real problems on a Scrum team, especially the human ones.
-
A Scrum by Example teaching story, set in our fictional World's Smallest Online Bookstore.
About a third of the way down the Product Backlog there's a Story: "As Julia (a Real Estate Agent and frequent book buyer), I want to buy a gift card to thank a fantastic recent client." Estimated at 20, so the team agrees it needs to be split.
As the Scrum Team discusses the Story, they ask Product Owner Paula several clarifying questions. How will the recipient redeem the gift card? Already covered in a later story, also estimated at 20. Printable or electronic? Electronic for now. Fancy graphics and messaging? Nice to have, not essential for v1. Refillable or one-time use? Undecided.
Seeing that refillable gift cards cost 8 Story Points, Paula says, "That's expensive for the value I get," and pushes it down in priority. She also notices the combined cost of the $10 gift card Story and the alternate-denominations Story is 18 Points, quite large. She asks if it would be cheaper to allow any amount. The Team comes back with an estimate of 8: still more complex than the basic Story, but far less than 18.
All of this leads Paula to realize that being able to use a gift card is as important as buying one.
The leading cause of poor Sprint Planning, and therefore crappy Sprints, is team members not understanding the User Stories they're working on. Refinement exists to make sure the Product Backlog is clear and understood by everyone before the Sprint, not just to make it look good.
Scrum by Example is a narrative-style blog series designed to help people think through real problems on a Scrum team, especially the human ones.