Step 4: Let Product Owners Pitch

The participants of your self-selection event need to know what they will be signing up for. They need answers to questions such as these:

• What type of work will the squad be doing?

• What is the squad’s purpose and mission?

• Who are the customers?

• What will the technical focus be?

It’s important for people to make an informed decision and to have the opportunity to help the company solve customer problems in the area they’re most passionate about. The best person to introduce a squad’s purpose and direction is the product owner.

The product owner owns the product on behalf of the customer. According to the Scrum Primer,^[8] the product owner is responsible for maximizing return on investment by identifying product features, translating these into a prioritized list, and continually reprioritizing and refining the list. The product owner makes sure the squad builds the right thing. You could also say that the product owner is the person with the business skills on the squad. (You can see a list of product owner tasks here.)

Self-selection provides an increased focus on personal relationships, and the future relationship with the product owner is an important consideration. It’s important for squad members to hear the pitch “from the horse’s mouth” and to have the opportunity to ask questions. The following image shows one of our product owners delivering his pitch.

A good product owner pitch should explain the purpose of the squad and the type of things members will work on. For example:

We are going to be the “Seller Squad.” Our focus will be to make the sales process on our site easy and delightful. We will take care of anything our sellers want, and we will be driven by the wishes of our five major accounts. The work will be pretty, front-end design stuff with a fast turnaround time.

If there are current projects, these should be explained too. Remember to make members aware that projects will finish and that choosing a squad is a longer-term commitment beyond the scope of just the current project.

Those who are new to the organization may find it hard to remember the details of the pitches. If you have a lot of new people, as it is often the case in a rapidly growing organization, provide a printed version of the product owner presentations.