Stakeholders Aren’t Involved

In the nonprofit example we just described, excluding stakeholders from the sprint review was the key point of failure for the project. Your product owner may want to delay conversations about your project’s scope and about stakeholders’ wants and needs, but that’s not the right thing to do. As you just saw, such lack of transparency can kill a product.

Joe asks:

Who are my stakeholders?

A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the outcome of a product-development effort. From employees whose jobs will be changed by the project to the folks who approved funding for it, stakeholders can come from all corners of an organization. Who they are depends on the nature of the product.

A product owner should understand who their stakeholders are and have searched every corner of the organization to ensure that they have appropriately defined and included everyone. Also, keep in mind that the stakeholders may change throughout the life cycle of the development effort. The product owner should occasionally revisit their list of stakeholders and check to see whether anyone should be added to or removed from that list.

Product owners must know who the stakeholders are at any given moment. They need to make sure that the appropriate people are involved in the sprint review so that the increment is properly inspected. As the Scrum master, work with your product owner to ensure that they have identified stakeholders from every corner of your organization. Product owners should be just as wary about having not enough stakeholder representation in the room during sprint reviews as they are of having too much.

An important component of Scrum, and one that impacts all the practices and principles of it, is building trust between the organization and the Scrum team. Having stakeholders attend sprint reviews helps build that trust, especially early in a product-development effort. Stakeholders need to actively participate in sprint reviews in order to understand what’s happening with the product. This process leads to the product owner adapting the product backlog by incorporating new requirements, changes in the market, new mandates, and so on. Without the appropriate representation in a review, a Scrum team might be moving in the wrong direction.

If your product owner is having trouble identifying stakeholders, try this exercise:

1. Sit with your product owner—and perhaps some of the stakeholders they’ve already identified—and try to think of every person in the organization who has a vested interest in the outcome of what you’re building. Write each person’s name on a separate sticky note. If you get stuck, consider these questions:

   • Where is the money coming from?

   • Whose job is going to change because of this product?

   • Who might interact differently with a customer as a result of what we are building?

   • Who might be angry if they don’t know what’s going on with this project?

2. Once your brainstorming slows, take a break.

3. When you reconvene, create the following three categories on a whiteboard or flip chart, and then place each sticky note in the appropriate category:

   • Required for the Sprint Review: These are people who need the most information about the product. If these people don’t inspect the increment and provide feedback, the Scrum team can’t make informed changes to the product backlog.

   • Keep Informed of Progress: These are folks who don’t need to inspect the increment every sprint, but who do need to be kept apprised of the team’s progress.

   • Monitor: These are people who don’t need updates frequently, but who should periodically receive updates about the project. It’s best to check with them to see how often they’d like to receive these updates.

This exercise can give the product owner a good sense of where he should be spending his time. It’s best to perform this activity every so often, since you might change which category you assign a stakeholder to over the course of a project.