How to resolve request conflicts between business-side and user-side?
Being customer-centric
This is another question from my another mentee who approves of the spirit of agile. One day he dropped me a private message and would like to arrange a call with me talking about how to resolve the request conflicts between business-side and user-side.
He said: “I think we should be focusing on customer requirements first, but our product owner often gives me unvalidated requests that interrupt the team’s development pace, what should I do?”
Well, are you familiar with the condition? I often met the situation before, but he was not the product owner, but my manager … so I had to handle this problem to reduce his interruptions to the team.
In this case, the product owner is not the business owner who really invests budget on the project, so there are more options to cope with him. In my opinion, there are 3 options you could take.
- risk analysis
We embrace changes over following a plan, but that does not mean we don’t need to control changes, especially we have limited time and budget. Reasonable changes are acceptable. When someone throws a meteorite to you, try to recognize the risk as you accept it, and let the product owner know what would happen if his requests are put into the practice. If he could accept the potential consequence once they change some requests?
- define key result from project roadmap
Besides, as we define the project roadmap, we should as well define the key result for each release, and spare no effort to make it happen. What if the key results are not met because of accepting the additional requests from business-side? Could the product owner provide other alternatives to eliminate the risks? If the business owner accepts the consequences for that? What would happen to end-users?
- check if human resources are enough?
Lastly, remember to check whether the current human resources are sufficient to accept the requests, because this would be the last line of defense if the above 2 options are available. If the requests could add value to the project goals or accelerate the development, and the associative risks could be identified and avoidable, you could accept it as there are additional manpowers to consume them.
After hearing the above suggestions, the mentee becomes clear with what to do with the product owner and felt helpful. We embrace changes over following a plan. Yes I love it, but it should be adaptive to business contexts.
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