We're in a quite complex software engineering project with lots of unknowns due to new technologies involved that the Team has never applied nor have comparable experience.
Due to these risks the Product Owner (PO) requested a "confidence check" of if the Team will reach the minimum viable product (MVP) by a certain deadline this year. Since "deadline" and doing Scrum clash quite a bit, the Team was really hesitating to give the PO an answer.
The PO required to have this indication for a CEO's report; thus, all had to rate it; there was no way around. So I took the rating as part of a Retrospective. We're in Sprint 2 of 8; the real velocity is not clear to the Team yet.
He asked the Team to vote 1 - 5 regarding these phrases:
- 5 - Yes, I'm confident. There is a clear and transparent path forward to achieve the MVP.
- 4 - Yes, I'm confident but the path forward is not fully transparent to me.
- 3 - Yes, I'm fairly confident that we can make it happen but I see some risks.
- 2 - No, I'm not confident anymore. There are too many obstacles.
- 1 - No, I'm already convinced that there will be a delay.
Here's the result I'd like to share. The Dev Team is quite large, since we have multiple streams - some votes are also from people of an extended Team.
I'd like to get your opinions on this.
- How do you see this situation?
- Is this a valid way to get feedback from the Team as a means to report to the CEO under the circumstances of facing risks that could risk feasibility of the MVP?
- Is there a better and more agile-friendly way to get feedback from the Team? How would you facilitate such a decision?