When Agile Team Transparency Leads to Micromanagement
Photo by Rodney Campbell
A manager reached out to me wanting help improving collaboration between her team and their Product Owners (yes, plural…)
She’d worked with the team to increase transparency: they work from a backlog that is regularly reviewed with the POs, the work in progress and remaining tasks are clearly visible in their ALM tool, POs are invited to attend the team’s standups, and they’re having regular retrospectives.
The trouble is, the Product Owners complain that the team is not getting enough work done, scrutinize the task hours and progress in standups, and are deflating the team’s morale.
In a podcast episode, Esther Perel shared an idea from Rachel Botsman that stood out to me – “…at other times, transparency leads to surveillance.”
The team and manager wanted to build trust with their Product Owners by creating transparency, and they got the opposite instead. Their POs feel they always have to know what the team is doing, which shows a lack of trust.
How do you collaborate with people who don’t trust you?
To me, the first step is looking at why the team and the Product Owners to need to work together—what’s the purpose or goal of the product?
Many organizations focus on feature delivery. Features reduce the uncertainty people feel about how we will achieve our business goals; they can create clarity and alignment amongst teams. However, feature-focus can also cause us to lose sight of the customers we want to serve and business results we’re striving for—we may deliver features and discover later that they did not generate the results we wanted.
Getting both Product Owners and development teams to look beyond features can create alignment on the harder business problems they are to solve together. In other words, let’s have the Product Owners be more transparent about the product goals.
What does success look like for the product? What would success look like for the team and Product Owners? Who is helped by the product?
Johanna Rothman has a related post on how managers can also share context and create transparency for teams to deliver successful products.
When teams and Product Owners have a shared understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish, it becomes easier to navigate how their roles work together.
