The Core Scrum Values on which the Scrum framework is based, relate to the team's productivity and turning Scrum into a valuable system where the team can thrive and achieve business outcomes.
By embodying the values of Commitment – Focus – Openness – Respect – Courage we are creating a great place to work where our behavior and actions are guided by the correct understanding of the Scrum Values. These values should be embodied in our mindset in order to sustain the team's productivity and drive the behavior of team members.
The Product Owner has a crucial role in a Scrum team by leveraging these Scrum Values within the team and accelerating product outcomes.
In this post, we'll take a closer look at why using these Scrum Values matter for maximizing business outcomes.
Living the 5 Scrum values is different than talking about them.
Think about when a person tells you to wait in a line and says to you "Thank you for your patience, we appreciate your time'. Easy to say, right?
Scrum Values cannot be mandated to a team, the team needs to adopt them and live these values. Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living these five values.
Adhering to the Scrum Values should lead to concrete changes in the team’s behavior and in the team’s ways of working, as specified in the Scrum Guide.
Let's deep dive into the 5 scrum values and think a little bit about them in your actual ways of working by answering this question:
Are you really applying the Scrum Values into daily team interactions?
Here is a short description of each Scrum Value, along with insights from a Product Owner perspective, that could help you visualize how you are applying them in your current context.
Commitment
There is a widely spread misinterpretation about commitment in a Scrum context. Commitment is often wrongly understood as being what a team commits to take on from the Product Backlog, into a sprint. Nothing more wrong than that.
As a core Scrum Value, Commitment is about dedication applied to the effort and actions spent on doing the work, but not on the final result.
For example, Product Owners are committed to bringing product value and having an impact on the most important stakeholders, end users.
PO's commit to achieve successful results along with the Scrum team. PO's commit to order the Product Backlog based on the outcome they might bring.
A Product Owner can have a high impact on building the commitment within a team, for example when a PO shares early insights about the upcoming features and what are the business objectives and he/she commits to guide the team on building the right product for the customer.
Focus
The Sprint allows a team to focus on the same problem in a specific time frame. But why do we need this kind of focus in our ways of working?
We focus on what is most important now, on the business value that can be delivered by building the right product to fulfill customer needs.
We focus on getting the things done, by accelerating what value can be delivered first and the entire team needs to minimize waste and how they can move the sprint forward by focusing on the essentials.
A Product Owner plays a crucial role in applying this value with his/her team. The development team needs to know what are the most valuable features for the customers and understand them in order to build the right pieces of the puzzle from the Product Backlog. PO’s know how to order the Product Backlog based on the item’s importance and by discussing with the development team, they can get more insights on what they need to focus first.
Openness
What can the Scrum Value of openness easily impact?
Scrum teams need to be open about their progress. Team members should feel comfortable sharing their work. They need to be able to admit as a team when they’re wrong and be open to collaboration and feedback.
For example, at the Retrospective event, Scrum teams open to address success and failure demonstrate the value of openness.
From a Product Owner’s perspective, he or she needs to be open to collaborate with other people within the organization in order to get more insights for creating the product vision. Also the Product Owner works closely with the stakeholders and the development team in order to enhance transparency on why the product is being built. PO’s can show openness by accepting suggestions from the Development team, as they are the ones building the product and might see things that the PO doesn’t.
Respect
As Gunther Verheyen said “We respect the accountabilities of the Scrum roles”.
We should show respect in everything we do, especially in regards to people, their experience and each other’s difference of opinion, in order to work as a team in building the right products for our customers.
Product Owners show respect to the team by trusting them to provide the “How to build the right thing” for the product. PO's show respect to the stakeholders by listening to their feedback and insights on the product in order to continuously adapt the Product Backlog based on the real needs of the users. PO’s show respect to the empiricism approach. And the list can be continued...
Courage
From the Scrum Guide "The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing, to work on tough problems."
We show courage in not building things that don't matter for real users, even though they matter for some business stakeholders. Courage to share feedback on what we do. Courage to not fear failure. Working with Lean principles we continuously learn and improve what we do in order to build what matters - the right product for our customers. We show courage to continuously learn and inspect our work. Courage to change the product direction for better outcomes, rather than focusing on outputs.
From a Product Owner perspective, courage is shown when learning from failed experiments, when taking the decision of changing the product direction for better adoption of the product. PO's show courage when saying NO to building the wrong product. PO's show courage when negotiating with business stakeholders or with the development team certain aspects of the product. Last, but not least, PO’s show courage by admitting that he/she does not know everything that is needed for building the product.
Final thought: The Product Owner can have an impactful contribution to applying the core Scrum values within the entire Scrum team. He or she can create an environment where the team understands and applies them. The main goal? Accelerate the achievement of business outcomes.
This article is inspired from the official Scrum blog’s post and from Gunther Verheyen's original post.