I'm a project manager for a team of firmware engineers making the transition to adopting Scrum and I'm moving to support the team in a Product Owner role. We've just gone through Scrum training and are beginning a month of coaching which is going to be invaluable. Coming from a technical background I can already see the challenge of shifting my point of view from the solution domain to focusing on business value. For me it's very tempting to think of how to solve a problem. But I like the concept of user stories and defining vertical slices of functionality that give value to the customer and letting the team determine the how. Forgive me if this is a naive question, but as the PO how can I provide guidance on specific technical direction through user stories? My concern is that in some cases without guidance the team may head down the wrong path on key technical decisions.As a simplistic example I might have a user story:As a clinician I want the device to record information about the patient's treatment so that I can determine if the patient's therapy has been effective.Now say time to market is critical and I want to fork out for an off-the-shelf file system stack to save time, what conveys that to the team? They might go off and start writing their own stack from scratch. Is this sort of guidance provided through:Conversations during sprint planning and backlog grooming? But if so, is it my place as the PO to even be suggesting how to solve a problem.Acceptance criteria? I don't really like this, I have a bad feeling about making acceptance criteria so prescriptive that they specify how to solve a problem.Constraints?Thanks in advance. I could (and will) ask our Scrum coach but I won't be able to do that before Monday and this question has been really bugging me :)
How can I provide guidance on technology choices through user stories?
scrum;product owner