Arguably the purpose of a Scrum team is to deliver value to stakeholders, and this is primarily done by shipping new and improved versions of the product to its users.
There are many different stakeholders involved with the product, either directly or indirectly.
End users of the software may want bugs fixed and new features rolled out. Company executives may want to sell more licenses to increase profits, management may want to reduce technical debt so the codebase is less costly to maintain, DevOps may want a more reliable hosting platform to reduce the 1st line support rota.
These are all examples of stakeholders requesting value from the product.
The product owner is the individual who ultimately decides who gets what value and when, a difficult and demanding role performed on behalf of all relevant stakeholders. The development team helps the product owner by providing technical estimates and commentary on the feasibility of proposed changes or additions to the product.
As product decisions should be transparent, all this gets documented in the product backlog. The development team implements the product backlog in priority order as set by the product owner.
If the product owner is diligent and has done a good job, then each new version of the product better satisfies the needs of one or more stakeholders.
This is how value is created in an agile product team.
If you are unhappy with your development team, they may need more detailed guidance.
Better software requirements can help with this.
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Frank Ray Consulting. Software requirements for agile development teams, particularly remote, outsourced and offshore development teams working in financial services. |