Sari Rahmani Sya’baniah (Ai) & Rosalia Adisti (Rosa)Agile Coaches at Bukalapak

Presented in Scrum Day Europe 2019Amsterdam, 11 July 2019

When the Product Owner takes care of the (Scrum) process: Impact on Value Delivery

Image by skeeze from Pixabay

500K+ Mitra Bukalapak

More than 140 seller communities by cities

100K+Active access/sec

4Mio+

Pelapak

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2015

Chaotic process, “we do what our competitors do” with less than 6 teams/100 product dev talents

2016

2017

2018

2019Introduction of Agile and Scrum. PM was asked to maintain the practices.

More teams are formed, practices started to stray. Scaling up

Late 2018: “Scrum Master” from the development team. More than 60 teams/1000 product dev talents

Going forward, experimenting ways of working

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What does a Product Owner do?

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Hi! We’re Billy and Lala, Bukalapak’s Product Managers.

We’re gonna tell you our story from back in 2017!(P.S. Can you find out our differences? What caught your attention?

Background 2019

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2017

VIDEO

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Let’s discuss

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So what was the difference?

Product focused PMs did not care about the process

Process focused PMs wanted to balance the product & the process

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Their focus are different.

Background 2019

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2019

Why did PMs have to maintain the process?01

02What really happened afterwards? (And why did it happened that way)

03 How to solve the problem?

So let’s dissect this one by one.

“ “

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Why did PMs have to maintain the process?

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Because, back in 2016...

Chaotic process

It was bad back then and it had to change

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Unclear Product Manager

role

What should product managers do? Goals only

related to competitor, time constraint

Immature

Engineering team

System down daily, no functional leaders

What really happened?

(we promised that we’d talk about value delivery…)

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Product focused PMs did not deliver the value right

Undelivered “promises”, no understanding about velocity, burnt out team.

Process focused PMs did not deliver the right value

Improvements that do not make real impact, not user focused, not innovative

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For the one who wants to balance both, there is a conflict of interest

Product & process are maintained by the same person; the one who has to make the quality decision also is the one who has the timeline

decision.

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Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash

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In both cases, teams do not understand agile

beyond the mechanical practices.

Why did it happen the way it happened?

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We didn’t periodically evaluate this

The PMs themselves did not fully understand why they’re doing this

That was not the main responsibility of PM, so they took it as their “additional” role

In 2018, we tried to change this but it was more difficult since the

organization was already large.

How to solve the problem?

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Role separation is important. There should also be a

clearer expectation of a Product Owner.

Also keep experimenting &

evaluating!

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In our case, combining roles was ok in the beginning &

under certain circumstances, but it didn’t work in the

long run. For POs who maintain (scrum) process, in

delivering value,

Insummary,

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When you’re implementing Scrum, pay

attention to your role separation and

periodically evaluate whether it works.

The product focused people will not

deliver the value right

The process focused people will not deliver

the right value

Sari Rahmani Sya’baniahAgile Coachlinkedin.com/in/aisyabaniah

Rosalia AdistiAgile Coachlinkedin.com/in/rosaliaadisti

Thank you! Let’s have a discussion!

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