Product Owner is prioritizing based on time estimate, rather than business value
I work as a SCRUM Master in a Software Dev team that handles both production support tickets/ break fix tickets and also new features.
This specific software product is a legacy system and the backlog refinement is often detailed.
I have a Product Owner, that continues to ask for an estimate of task, mid sprint, in order to determine where that production support ticket will fits on the prioritised backlog for the next sprint.
For e.g, if the Tshirt estimate is either a Large or XL , then on occasions, he would avoid scheduling this higher on the Product backlog knowing that this would jeopardize other work on his backlog.
My feedback is always to prioritize based on 'value', value to the customer and business. And for Production Support tickets, use the Cost of Delay method to determine the opportunity cost of not completing the task.
What are your thoughts?
Have you asked the Product Owner how he currently accounts for value, and tries to maximize it?
For e.g, if the Tshirt estimate is either a Large or XL , then on occasions, he would avoid scheduling this higher on the Product backlog knowing that this would jeopardize other work on his backlog.
Are you sure that the Product Owner does not prioritize based on a combination of factors?
For example, if it is believed to require 1 day to deliver $5000 of perceived value, it might make sense to do this before investing 5 days to deliver $8000 of perceived value.
There could be other factors to consider, such as whether certain market opportunities or obligations are time-critical, dependencies between planned units of work, or validation of hypotheses to maximize the chance of building the right thing.
" And for Production Support tickets, use the Cost of Delay method to determine the opportunity cost of not completing the task."
The thing is, calculating a more-or-less meaningful cost of delay for a bug which does not cause major disruption, costs a lot more than the delay itself.