A Product Owner’s Collaboration with Work-From-Home Teams

Modern technology is advancing with demand for products. It’s become necessary for enterprises to respond to the challenges and trends of the market with dynamic and flexible thinking for survival and growth. We are definitely in an era of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity).  

In Figure 1, a man is walking to the castle. Despite seeing the target, his sight is affected by the thick fog. He can only move forward step by step and correct the direction of advancement from time to time. This can be a metaphor for using scrum to develop, deliver, and maintain complex products.

Figure 1 The target of the VUCA era is like the castle in the fog

Translating a book from English to Traditional Chinese

In the wake of this agile trend spreading globally, I met Roman Pichler, the author of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love, virtually. Roman is a leading agile product management expert and Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST®). This serendipitously brought me to ask his permission to translate his book into traditional Chinese. 

A unique approach to book translations

The translation, albeit not a complex product, involved a complex, remote, multi-person collaborative environment. Unlike previous projects, this was the first time the publishing house used a team of translators rather than using an agency or single person. Likewise, most scrum teams work in a physical office environment where they could have face-to-face discussions, but we turned to the work-from-home (WFH) model as a result of COVID-19. A final challenge, with a large team of up to 22 people divided into two groups, there was a need for a high degree of collaboration and a consistent translation style. How could such a virtual scrum team operate? All these were new challenges for us.

Agile has been mainstreamed previously for the development of information systems. This project demonstrated that the agile practice is applicable to the WFH model and the development of non-information systems. Read on to see how I led the team to complete the localization project in three months.

A product owner needs to be sensitive to market demand

As defined, a scrum team assumes three accountabilities, each assigned with distinct duties. This time, I focused on my role as a product owner for the team. The product owner is the soul of a product and key to its success. As Roman’s book mentions, “A project with an underpowered product owner is much like a car with an underpowered engine: The car runs, but it struggles when the going gets tough.” A good product owner can lead the team smoothly on the track and survive even when they encounter obstacles. 

“A project with an underpowered product owner is much like a car with an underpowered engine: The car runs, but it struggles when the going gets tough.” 

Using the scrum framework to guide a team to complete the localization project

The translation of this book is unique in that the team members worked together remotely on a pro bono basis. Roman’s book says, “I have found recurring issues with distant product owners, including mistrust, miscommunication, misalignment, and slow progress.” I wanted to avoid these situations before the project started, so I came up with some solutions and ended up producing a top-quality translation.

The result? Despite the fact that the book was translated by 22 people, the output was in a consistent style and it reads as if it came from one person. Why is that? Because we stayed true to The Three Pillars of Scrum: Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation. The translation process we planned for the agile virtual team is as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Translation process of the agile virtual team

Transparency 

Since we couldn't have face-to-face meetings with poster papers and post-it notes, I used Miro software to enable team members to stay aligned. With it, I could show my disassembled product backlog easily and everyone could edit the sprint backlog online, which allowed everyone to see progress and bottlenecks at a glance. This approach fully demonstrated the spirit of transparency, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Transparent Miro for the agile virtual team

Inspection 

Secondly, we held a virtual 15-min daily scrum by Zoom to make sure everyone was on track or could discuss obstacles. Since the team was made up of volunteers, I asked our scrum master to educate and train the volunteer team before the product development started. I also shared a common vision with them to reinforce their beliefs and motivation. We drew up a working agreement together, one requirement of which read, “No matter how busy we are, we agree to attend at least 60% of meetings each week.”

Adaptation 

Thirdly, the sprint mechanism allowed us to identify bottlenecks early on. In the beginning, for example, the publishing house expected us to complete the project in two months, so the initial set amount of proofreading for each sprint was 20 pages. However, the first sprint review revealed that the lift was too great and only half of the project was completed. As a result, I negotiated with the publishing house and reduced the proofreading amount to 14 pages for each sprint. While this caused delays, it was also important to ease the team's resources.

Summary and experience sharing

1. Key points of WFH agile teamwork: The mission of the product owner is to build a vision for the team’s product. In this case, the localization project was conducted by a virtual team, so a stronger motivation and vision were needed to bring everyone together. Our vision was of “bringing the international product owner classic into sight throughout Taiwan.” During the establishment of the virtual team, I helped members clearly understand the vision, purposes, and objectives through various network communication methods, enabling them to integrate into the team and adapt to their assigned tasks as soon as possible. For example, I made time for the team to guide their reading of the book together, so they could get acquainted with each other and build rapport.

2. Breakthrough of this project: A competent product owner takes responsibility not only for finishing the development of a product, but also for its sales, which in this case is the sales of this book. For this reason, I came up with the idea of arranging an online Zoom interview with Roman Pichler as a book launch. The interview was attended by close to 500 people and successfully exposed the book to the public, as shown in Figure 4. We are very grateful to Roman for accepting our interview.

Figure 4 Zoom interview with Roman Pichler

3. Improvement for next book: The only improvement, in my opinion, is that it would be better to require a higher level of English proficiency and an agile-related certification when initially recruiting members of the team. However, it doesn't matter if they don't have both, because agile teams are designed to be cross-functional, where everyone can work in support of each other.

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Dr. Roger Chou, CSP®-SM, CSP®-PO is CEO of PM-ABC. Inc. He was one of the first three people in Taiwan to earn a Scrum Alliance CSP certification. Since July of 2014, He and Bill Li, CST have trained over 50% of the CSM certificants in Taiwan. In 2015, Roger received the award from YOH in London for “The Person Who Has Done the Most to Promote Agile”.