Hands On: Scaling Product Backlogs using Visual Models

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Are you a Product Owner(PO) or Scrum Master(SM) who has been given a new role as your company scales their agile approach? Like many, I started as a Team PO and was “blessed” with a promotion to Product Manager of a SAFe Agile Release Train (ART) when my client implemented SAFe. At first, I was a little flummoxed of how to manage 7 teams backlogs that were reporting to the train and handle the bigger group of business stakeholder providing input to the program vision.

Luckily, I remembered many of the tools I used as Team PO and began to tweak and rework them to handle the increased scope of my new ART world. Come and join me as we learn about two visual models that are typically used at the team level by POs and SMs but can easily be scaled to any level of the organization. First, we’ll learn about the Business Objectives Model which helps us ensure we’re building the highest business value items first at the team level and how that scales to programs and portfolios. THen we’ll discuss how Feature Trees, used at the team level to organize scope in a one-page view, can be scaled to show similar information at any level.

At the end of this workshop, attendees will have two new tools in their toolkit to take back to their organizations regardless of the level of enterprise they are working in. I love using visual models as a PO on an individual product, but I’ve come to learn over the past several years, that they are incredibly useful for all levels of management (program, portfolio, and large solutions if you are doing SAFe), so come, have fun and build some new visual models in a scaled way!