Owning a product, leading a team, hiring a professional, designing an architecture with colleagues, and almost everything in life is a negotiation. Serial trade-offs, intercessions, conciliations or dialogues.
A great way of learning how to negotiate is through the George Siedel course in Coursera: Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills. Have a look and try it out. I learnt a lot!
You can see everywhere that more and more companies are not including a Scrum Master in their teams. Others renamed the Product Owner role as Product Managers or Product Marketing Managers, and these don’t play the same rules as the PO. Many are even dropping Scrum and moving to a plain Kanban.
Software industry got fed up with Agile Coaches, stiff ceremonies, games and multitude of meetings. I don’t blame them for doing so. I personally reckon you’ll do it OK if you pick the best of each framework and remove any practice that is not working for you or it is not as productive as it should be (Law of Diminishing Returns).
Keep stuck with the basics: deliver software frequently, welcome changes, work close to Business people, and more important than anything, keep it neat and simple. You’ll be OK.
We tend to believe that creating comprehensive Gantt diagrams, precise roadmap documents, and making the customer sign the meeting minutes will make us and our projects more trustworthy.
We need to plan, and try to foresee what is coming, but you can only be sure of a few things: estimations are going to be wrong, customers are going to change their minds, and you’ll need to adjust the Gantt.
Suggest, propose, execute, test and iterate again. As Naval Ravikant says, do 10,000 iterations not 10,000 hours.
What to do if it takes me ages to get to production? Have a look to this article if your cycle time is huge: https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/10/theory-of-constraints-toc.html
What to do if your to-do list and backlog is growing endlessly:
And when your tangled with bugs and incidents, but no any new features: https://www.antoniomartel.com/2023/11/equilibrium.html
From The Professional Product Owner book: Growth of technical debt by poorly designed software where budget is progressively consumed as the old software is kept alive. If you fail to address technical debt now, you will end up paying more interest in the future.
Netscape’s project to improve HTML layout in Navigator 4 has been cited as an example of a failed rewrite. The code base was so bad that developers couldn’t work on it anymore; they decided to rewrite a new engine, causing many failures in existing features and a delay in the release of several months. Meanwhile, Microsoft used incremental improvements to Internet Explorer and overcame those obstacles.
The Professional Product Owner book