It’s about time to nag the product owner, isn’t it. Fortunately, there are plenty ways to do this. To help you in your quest to do so I created a list of 10 proofed ways to drive your Product Owner crazy:
- Five minutes before the Sprint Review is the right time to tell your Product Owner that your team wasn’t able to finish anything. It is even more fun, if this was a planned release. Transparency is for milquetoasts.
- Don’t invite the Product Owner to any Scrum meeting. He is a chicken and you are the pigs, right.
- Ignore the Sprint backlog and work on the features you like the most. Who cares about the Product Owner’s vision?
- Assign all tasks that were created during your retrospective to your Product Owner. He is the root of all evil and responsible for all the problems in the project.
- Don’t attend the Sprint Review. You already know how your product looks like.
- Never show the real product in the Sprint Review. Instead, prepare a nice and shiny power point presentation.
- Never talk to the Product Owner if you have questions about a feature. Instead, implement it based on your favorite assumptions.
- If it is difficult to establish a stable communication to your Product Owner, define someone in your team to become the so called Product Owner proxy.
- Always break your release date promises. Everyone loves surprises.
- Question everything that is in the product backlog and try to start lengthy discussions about as many features as possible. At least, that’s what your mother told you.
Try this out and post your experiences in the comments. If you have additional ideas, feel free to add them, too.
