Chapter II – The Product Vision

Welcome back reader, and thank you for following up on my second chapter. 

Now to pick off where we stopped last time, I was all geared up to have my first meeting with the Business Analyst. This was the meeting, where I intend to brief him on my product idea and also to appoint him as a co-product owner.

One Product, Two Product Owners

I was prepared for our meeting with the following items ready at hand. The purpose was to convey the product idea in the best possible manner.

a) A hand sketch that I had done on the product idea, mentioned in my 1st chapter. 

b) A couple of websites that portrayed resemblance to the idea.

c) Options of an Agile tool to use, like Orange Scrum or Jira.

I was thankful to have my idea taken in with much enthusiasm. The sketch worked as a base for the explanation and also helped churn out great ideas. As my sketch kept getting more detailed as we proceeded with the meeting, it was also decided that we should revisit the MVP and make sure that all the ideas were stored effectively, until we decide on a tool.

As I briefed my colleague on the co-product idea, he did have his doubts. The doubt that stood out was, on how we could set a process that can discuss different perspectives, yet agree on the same points, before adding them to the visible backlog for the team. 

As I saw it, the two main hurdles of having a co-product owner could be:

a) He/she would need to have the same level of enthusiasm and love for the product.

b) Both product owners should have the same understanding and viewpoints and should have a forum to discuss the same.

Fortunately, the 1st point did not seem like a hurdle at this point, and for the second, we decided to have a backlog refinement meeting together, once a week, which would help us sort out opinions and be on the same plane.

Now you would ask me, why to go to these lengths, and just avoid having an extra product owner. Well, I had my own reasons, as I mentioned in my 1st chapter. Although I was the owner of this product idea and wanted very much to get this transformed to a working product, I was sure that my availability to the team would be compromised.

So as our meeting concluded, we decided on the tool to be used. Jira had won, with all the amazing features it had for an Agile team. We proceeded to set an introductory meeting with the team, where we would present the idea again and also decide on the Agile framework, we would be following as a team.

Product Briefing Meeting with team

Now when you have a team; a hand drawn sketch for a product idea will never work. We decided to have a chart put up in the meeting room, where we could draw out the product vision and basic user flow, right in front of the team.

The team selected was a cross functional one, staying true to the Agile idea of a perfect team. The team strength was five and comprised of a designer, 2 developers, a tester, and a scrum master.

As the meeting commenced, we started out explaining the product and introduced each other with their respective roles in the team. Everyone gathered around the chart as we sketched out the vision again, from a user perspective. I could see that this experiment helped everyone gets involved and also made way for a lot of clarifications within the team.

At the end of the meeting, we had a visible MVP, drawn by the team themselves, and we were ready to schedule our first sprint planning meeting.

As product owners, it was now our responsibility to get together for a backlog creation meeting, before we commence the planning.

Stay tuned to see how we worked through this!