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Product backlog to large for one

Last post 06:29 am March 5, 2020 by Xander Ladage
3 replies
11:42 pm March 4, 2020

Recommendation.... we have work that is estimated to need two teams for a particular “product” this product serves three  different types of users yet they all share functionality in the system. Each type of user wants their own PO. The work spans to 2 teams at this time. What is your recommendation as to how to create a backlog . A backlog for the product . Two backlogs splitting the work in some sliced up manner. If two teams do end up pulling from one backlog , how wood ceremonies work? Does the product owner need to be present on both do any get combined. I’m curious as to what folks have seen works and what doesnt work .


01:40 am March 5, 2020

Adding a second (or third or fourth or...) team is not necessarily going to get work done faster. Adding teams will add coordination overhead to the effort required to understand, design, build, test, and deploy a system.

In a situation like this, the first step is to understand what products you have. Do you truly have one product? Or perhaps should you be building two or three separate products? In the context of Scrum, there will be a singular Product Owner for each product. However, consider that the Scrum Guide does say that the Product Owner "may represent the desires of a committee". There could be a small team of people working with the Product Owner to carry out product management activities, but there is still one person with final accountability for making sure that the work associated with Product Ownership gets done. If you end up splitting your product into multiple distinct products, then each product would have its own Product Backlog managed by a Product Owner.

As far as coordination goes, I've had the best success looking at Nexus and LeSS. Although they are designed for 3 or more teams coordinating on a single Product Backlog, some of the techniques and advice may be useful for a case where there are only two teams. Likewise, some of the practices would simply be unnecessary overhead until you have 3 or 4 teams that need to coordinate.


04:48 am March 5, 2020

Each type of user wants their own PO. 

How are users of each type getting together to express their shared desire? How are they representing the joint interests -- which typify them -- to you? 

Or is it more a case of each individual user wanting their own PO?


06:29 am March 5, 2020

Each type of user wants their own PO

What would be the benifit for them, or the problem solved, over having one accountable PO for the entire product?


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