Facilitating Professional Scrum Teams: Improve Team Alignment, Effectiveness, and Outcomes by Patricia Kong & Glaudia Califano & David Spinks

Author:Patricia Kong & Glaudia Califano & David Spinks
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Buy a Feature

The buy-a-feature technique was presented in the book Innovation Games.1 In it, participants are given play money and come together to “buy” the features they want. Some of the items are priced so that no one person can buy those features on their own, leading the group to have to negotiate with each other and agree on top priorities.

1 Hohmann, Luke (2006). Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play. Addison-Wesley Professional.

Buy a feature can help the Product Owner understand what the stakeholders think is valuable. The items in the Product Backlog are given a price that can be set based on Developer’s sizing, but it does not have to be. It works well with 12 to 20 items and a group of 4 to 7 stakeholders, with each given a certain amount of play money. Not all features can be paid for by the whole group.

The Product Owner may present the different Product Backlog items and their cost and then open the floor for the stakeholders to negotiate with each other to buy the features that are most important to them as a collective.

The learning for the Product Owner and the rest of the Scrum Team comes from observing the conversations between the stakeholders and their reasons for thinking certain Product Backlog items are valuable. These “why” conversations are what are really important. A Scrum Team that understands what stakeholders would like to achieve with certain features might be able to devise a better way to achieve the outcome. The stakeholders may even come up with ideas for splitting Product Backlog items into high-value smaller ones so they can “spend” their money more wisely.

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