Focus Requires Saying Not Yet ~ Mike Cohn

Focus Requires Saying Not Yet ~ Mike Cohn

Many Scrum problems are really focus problems.
Organizations try to do too many things at once. They have too many initiatives, too many urgent requests, too many stakeholders, too many priorities, and too little willingness to say “not yet.”
Scrum makes this visible.
A sprint creates a short planning horizon for deciding what the team can accomplish next. A sprint goal identifies the outcome that matters enough for the team to organize around it. A product backlog makes visible what is more important than what.
Those are uncomfortable conversations in an organization that wants everything at once.
So the difficulty often gets pushed onto teams and product owners.
Product owners are asked to satisfy too many stakeholders. Teams are asked to start more work than they can finish. Leaders ask for predictability while priorities continue to change. Everyone wants the benefits of focus without making the tradeoffs focus requires.
That does not work.
A product owner can help by bringing focus to the team. That means saying what should be done and, just as importantly, what should not be done right now.
But product owners need support.
A product owner surrounded by stakeholders who believe every request is urgent will struggle to create focus unless leaders help establish the expectation that not everything can be first.
This is one reason Scrum can feel frustrating.
The team is asked to commit to a sprint goal, but the organization keeps behaving as if everything is urgent. The team is asked to be predictable, but priorities keep changing. The product owner is expected to make good priority decisions, but every stakeholder wants a different answer.
Scrum exposes the need for difficult prioritization.
That exposure is useful. It gives the organization a chance to make better decisions.
Try this: Before the next sprint, ask stakeholders and leaders to complete this sentence:
For this team to succeed in the next sprint, we are choosing not to work on ____ yet.
If no one can fill in the blank, the team probably does not have focus. It has a list of competing demands.

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