Samuli Heljo | Communicating product backlog

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Communicating product backlog

published October 8, 2010

Many customers that I have had conversation with, feel that one of their major concerns is a possible misunderstanding about product backlog items. Does a team really understand the meaning beneath user stories and is the correct solution built? Are there some good ways to enhance communication between a product owner and a scrum team?

Alistair Cockburn uses term “Richness of communication channel” to describe communication effectiveness between people (see a diagram here). What he claims, is that the least effective communication media is a written document. On the contrary, the most effective communication happens when two people are interacting face-to-face at whiteboard. From my experience, this is true.

Youtube contains nice presentations using motion graphics and scribing that communicate stories pretty smoothly. Walt Disney studios came up with storyboarding during 1930s which is something that is used e.g. in film industry. What I have tried, is to combine elements from all these into a product backlog storyboard in order to increase communication effectiveness.

Lets imagine that our team has to build a new feature to existing software. Product owner has written most of the features as user stories into product backlog. He has also produced some layouts how a UI should look like. These layouts won’t cover the whole solution and only work as a starting point. Problem now is that you have a product backlog which is very “cold” in terms of communication effectiveness and you will somehow have to increase richness when communicating features to the team. so, to be most effective we should meet at a whiteboard, right? Yes, but it is better to prepare stuff before whole team arrives.

What I have done, is drawn multiple storyboards like one below beforehand and used those as a “whiteboard”.

This is close to a user interface mock-up, but it tries to communicate the story without all detail in user interface. Storyboard gives us a shared visual representation and a story flow that can then be enhanced with people present. Storyboards should be hand drawn and are actually pretty fast to do. They can be hanged as a posters on a office wall, or discarded and redrawn in case they are incorrect. Storyboarding is quite effective method in cases where you yet have no real mock-up, and try to get people on same page.

Samuli @ 22:01 (No Comments)

tags: Scrum