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Writer's pictureRegina Batista

My Way Back to Product Owner

Awareness is key to making decisions in your Agile journey. This capability helps a great deal to answer how important it is to know who you are, what you like, and how happy you feel with your performance. On this ground, our speaker embarked on the not-so-easy task of sharing his route from Product Owner to Scrum Master and back to Product Owner.



How often do you apply the scrum values in your life?


Courage, focus, commitment, respect, and openness, the fundamental values that drive the Scrum Framework and the Scrum Team. If you find yourself down the path of Agility whether by choice or by chance, you will probably end up with an Agile framework called Scrum. This is what happened to Omar Gonzalez, a Business Analyst, who found himself facing the Agile direction following the company’s vision.


The startup company, however, decided to go with The Frankenstein Methodology (TFM) to implement Scrum. The problem? If you’ve read or even heard about Frankenstein, you know how well that ended up. It takes courage to choose people over process, it takes focus not to get derailed by what you’ve known and learned up until now, it takes commitment to stick to it even though implementation might look bad at times, and it takes respect and openness to see it through. The bright side? Our speaker got to know Agile and decided to apply these set of values in his life and veered off to true Agility and Scrum.


The Happiness Metric


As a Business Analyst, the first role Omar Gonzalez took within the Scrum Team was of a Product Owner. He found it exciting, and most importantly, he felt he was made for it. However, due to the company’s needs at the time, he soon was acting both as a Product Owner and Scrum Master. It was then that he got a feel of what it meant to be a Scrum Master. Certainly, the conversation changed, they were more people-oriented, more focused on conflict resolutions, powerful questions, etc.


Omar then decided to stay committed to his team, have open conversations with all parties involved, focus on a plan, and surf the Scrum Master wave to the best of his abilities. However, once more challenges arrived, he soon needed to come to terms with his happiness metric and have the courage to face how that would ultimately impact his performance; “At that moment my happiness level as a Scrum Master was a 3”. Was he ready to move upwards within his Scrum Master career path? Definitely not. He then veered off again towards Product Ownership. For him, “It’s so much easier to deal with codes than people”. Now back to being a Product Owner, he gained back the excitement, the rush, the number 10 level in his own personal Happiness Metric.


What’s next?


This is an answer for you to think about. As for Omar Gonzalez, he’s open to new horizons, eager to learn more about Product Ownership, and he wants to take his role to the next level.


If you think this blog entry is somewhat interested, don’t think twice to see the full meetup video here


Key topics:

  • How often do you apply the scrum values in your life?

  • The Frankenscrum

  • The Happiness Metric

  • Q&A


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