Rules to Better Product Owners

The client is generally the Product Owner (PO). They should read the Scrum Guide and watch the Product Owner video to understand their role. It is so important to the success of their project:

When working with a client-side Product Owner (PO), it’s crucial for the Scrum Master to come from the consultancy. Typically, the consultant Scrum Master has more experience in Agile and Scrum methodologies than the client PO. This experience can significantly impact the success of the project by providing essential guidance and support to the PO in their key responsibilities.

Without proper support, the PO might struggle with critical tasks like backlog management, prioritisation, and stakeholder communication, which can lead to misaligned expectations, missed deadlines, and reduced product quality.

Managing a backlog can quickly become overwhelming. It often grows into a long, messy list of user stories, bugs, and features. High-priority items get buried, duplicates sneak in, and new requests don't always come with clear next steps.

This is where AI can help. By connecting the GitHub or DevOps MCP to a host (eg. Claude Code), you can use natural language to query, refine, and prioritize your backlog — saving hours of manual effort.

Unless we're currently working on the last Sprint of the development, you should always book the next Sprint as soon as you start work on the current one.

Testing is a vital part of any development and can be quite time consuming, depending on the complexity of the application.

You WILL discover bugs in any newly developed software. This is perfectly normal. It's important to have a common understanding with your software developers about what to do when they arise.

There are lots of stakeholders in a software project. Users, Marketing, Managers, they all have requirements for the new system but if the spec becomes a free-for-all, it is more likely the project will be steered off-course.

Depending on how much visibility you need on ongoing costs, you will have to decide whether to use 1 or 2 week development iterations.

Some clients think that a Project Manager is just a resource that increases the cost of a project. But a house does not get built if you leave the architect, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers to just work it out between themselves. The house does get built if the foreman is keeping everyone on their toes, making sure they are doing their job.

Software teams often come with a Project Manager. You can do better than that by getting a Scrum Master.

When you're scoping the work to be completed, ensure you are as accurate as possible in your requirements.