We recently attended the PO Camp in Switzerland (#POCampCH). The camp started with a 1 day masterclass which was jointly run by us (Sam & Karen) and Steve Holyer. The title of the masterclass was Dealing with the dirt and the attendees determined the topics for the day, based on their specific challenges as Product Owners. We covered things like: MVP, Story Mapping, Prioritisation, UX techniques and a bunch more.
The following 2 days were open space – my favourite type of (un)conference! We attended many sessions and ran a few.
One of the sessions was on “How to create an online training video using TFTBOTR techniques”. We had about 8 people attend and decided to create a video in the session. Here is a link to the final video with exercises – the topic is Powerful Questions. Whilst the video is still very rough, the workshop of 1 hour proved that it is possible to experiment and create something in that time!
Another session was on “What do Product Owners need to know”. This was in effect a brain dump by around 13 product owners of everything they thought PO’s should know. I was amazed at how many people attended and at how many interesting things came up! (Just click on the images to see them enlarged).
Another session was on QAC. This is something we have been training PO’s to use as a prioritisation techniques for about 3 years but never named. The masterclass attendees wanted a name and so QAC was born: Quadrants for Allocating Capacity. We’ve blogged about this model before here.
I also attended a fascinating session on CoActive Coaching by Deb Hartmann Preuss. She offers a free coaching call so check it out: http://abiggerga.me/blog/.
There was a session by Steve Holyer on Agile Fluency and what it means. Loved the bus story! Basically, the aim is not to get 4*’s rather its to find out which bus stop (level of *’s) you and your company want to achieve and get off the bus there.
As I’m writing this up I’m remembering all sorts of other amazing session we went to and games we played – the Agile Oops was particularly funny. I said “the thing I love most in life” and Karen replied with “Concetta” 🙂 The word I was looking for was “time-boxing” – hahaha 🙂
All in all this was a fantastic camp. I loved the Product Owner focus and being immersed into the PO world for a few days. Thank you to everyone who attended and to all our new friends! We enjoyed our drinks in the bar though at 8.5 swiss francs (over R100!) per 100ml it cost an arm and a leg for us South Africans with a weak currency 🙂
To get great results with Scrum, you don’t just need a good team you need a great Product Owner that can optimise the value the team deliver.
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