Just Say No!

I could write about dozens of Agile challenges that we're wrestling with at work right now, but here's just one.

The Feature Teams don't have direct contact with our customers, unfortunately, on account of the many thousands of kilometres separating us from them. So to deal with this, we introduced the role of Product Owner internally, to provide a liason between the Feature Teams and the customers. And the logical people to fill those Product Owner roles were the various functional managers, as they had many of the business relationships already established with our customers. Plus, with their team members now distributed over a dozen or more Feature Teams, the functional manager role was becoming less of a full-time job anyway. It all makes sense, right?

Except here's the rub: when a Product Owner, representing a customer, applies pressure to a team in order to get whatever they want, the team has to recognize that they have the right to push back on unreasonable demands, and ask for clear acceptance criteria, and all the rest. But when the person doing the asking is a functional manager - maybe even their manager - a lot of these team members aren't finding that so easy. In fact, some of them are finding it downright impossible.

I've heard this complaint from a number of individuals over the past few months, but recently it's been coming up a lot more. While discussing it at a management meeting last week, there were a few incredulous looks around the table as the topic was described. In fairness, some of us find it pretty hard to imagine being that intimidated by anyone at work, especially someone who doesn't even mean to be intimidating!

And thus was born the "Just Say No!" campaign at work. It worked so well for Nancy Reagan and the War On Drugs, after all (before the Republicans realized that warring on terrorism was way more likely to get people worked up and out to vote). Now we'll similarly educate people on the evils of recreational Product Owner-capitulation, so to speak. We'll hold rallies, with balloons, and raise awareness in ways that awareness has never before been.. well, raised! A broad wave of just saying no -responsibly - will sweep the office!!

Well, OK, not really. I made that whole campaign up, in my head, during that meeting. It's not the kind of problem that you can solve with simplistic slogans, as anyone with any intelligence would know.