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Product backlog items running out

Last post 05:14 pm March 20, 2017 by Jason Jafarian
2 replies
Aims Dier
02:39 pm March 19, 2017

Hi all,

I'm a fairly new product owner (less than a year) but have been a BA in waterfall for a few years. In my current role as Product owner,  I have a bunch of projects I am working on at the moment  but am getting to a point where there aren't enough stories in the backlog for the next sprint. The reasons why...

  1. External dependencies before any development work and analysis can begin on certain projects. Includes issues being found which need to be addressed before starting development work
  2. The addition of a new large project which means it is all in the initial analysis  stage at the moment,  which will take me weeks to understand, talk to stakehokders and start putting together stories
  3. I'm also working on analysis for a project which will go to a different development team
  4. There is no BA in the team so I pick up the detail requirements writing
  5. There is a lot of work which doesn't involve the development team I.e. creating user documentation, finance impact  etc. Generally looking holistically at the product, similar to a product management role

As you can tell, I'm in a sticky situation where either I don't have enough time to do analysis or things seems to be out of my control and have become a bottleneck. Has anyone been in a similar position and can offer any advice?

Many thanks!

Ian Mitchell
04:53 pm March 20, 2017

Instead of populating the Product Backlog with user stories you don't have, why not enumerate the hypotheses you would wish to test? The team can then help you write product backlog items which would validate critical assumptions with empirical evidence.

Jason Jafarian
05:14 pm March 20, 2017

Would it make sense to delegate any of your tasks?  Although there should ideally be just one Product Owner, that doesn't mean you are the only employee on the team allowed to touch the backlog or perform analysis tasks.

If there aren't enough stories in the backlog to cover a full sprint, does it sound like one of the following is happening?

  • The product backlog only tracks several sprints of work, rather than the full scope of product work with several sprints worth of stories detailed out.
  • The stakeholders aren't communicating value to you effectively and don't know what they want, so there are no low priority tasks to complete.
  • You're done the project!  Everything is complete and the stakeholders don't want anything else.

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