Trust in practice

 
 

I don’t have a purpose in a vacuum: my role as a Scrum Product Owner exists because of my team. We each have different strengths and responsibilities, and fully trust everyone else to deliver their best at their work. By not second-guessing one another, we build an efficient and most of all enjoyable work place.

However, we are not people who happen to contribute individually to the same product; we bet on delegating and communicating frequently, to keep everyone up to date on what they need.

Trust is felt in our work:

  • At sprint planning, we have recently started to not only deliberately communicate our sprint goals, but review our quarterly roadmap together. This empowers everyone to understand what stories in our sprint are higher priority and pick them up first, as well as to make informed decisions during implementation to future-proof their work.

  • The most knowledgeable people to discuss tech debt tickets are the devs; that’s why they autonomously prioritise tech debt in our backlog. This way, when planning our next sprint, we optimise the space for continuous improvement by picking up the most useful tech debt tickets first.

  • We provide private, constructive feedback on each other’s performance often, praising as well as criticising, without fear of being misunderstood. We all know we all mean well.

  • Our team divides to conquer: my teammates can count on me to connect with our clients, organise and summarise business needs into user stories, and spare them the business side of the discovery process. Likewise, I can count on them to directly connect to developers from other teams (who provide us with pivotal input to work). This way, we spare everyone hours of meetings by cutting out the middle man, and just pass on a summary if necessary.

And although we do best to trust each other in our immediate surroundings, we shouldn’t expect the best intentions from strangers on the internet, even if (especially if) those strangers are companies that benefit from knowing everything about you through your personal data.