Several weeks ago my colleague Tamás made an interesting point about our planning meetings: we always committed to an iteration backlog – we are doing an interesting combination of Scrum and Kanban, but not Scrumban -, but we never asked our product owner whether she was happy with our commitment. She said that she hadn’t been satisfied, but followed what Scrum said anyway - classic autopilot behavior. This got me thinking and I realized that during the last couple of years every product owner I met had this very same problem: scrum was new and it didn’t help them much, because before Scrum the business dictated the speed of the development, but after introducing Scrum the development slowed down and started to live its own separate life.

In order to understand why, first have a look at this typical iteration backlog lifecycle:

The first sprint is usually more successful than the second one, but after five or six sprints the number of delivered user stories stabilizes – in Scrum terms: the velocity becomes stable. I talked to different Scrum Masters from different organisations and they independently told me that after the teams reach this kind of threshold, no matter what the product owner says or does, they deliver exactly the same amount of user stories. This is the point when the team starts its own life and starts to dictate to business: no matter what the product owner‘s expectation is, she will get the same amount of user stories sprint by sprint. Which is somehow good, makes the development predictable, but the business is never predictable, on the contrary, it changes a lot. Since the outcome of the planning does not follow the expectations of the product owner – which is driven by the business – she starts to ignore Scrum and eventually she gives up and from then on she will just pretend to be a product owner, when in reality she will fall back to classic project management.

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