At Agile 2008, I attended Jeff Patton’s talk on embracing uncertainty and Alan Cooper’s keynote on interaction design.

I am convinced it is the role of product owner or customer that needs the most work in our evolving agile practices.

Sponsors express their desires as feature requests. But, as Alan Cooper argues, there is no linear progression from what people need, what they perceive they need, and how they express that in language.

At the same time, supporting departments, customers and management want a commitment to a scope and schedule. And in response, the team wants methodical decomposition to estimatable stories.

And so product owners dive into story writing, decomposing software into smaller bits in order to grasp the whole from the details. But the resulting release backlog looks only slightly more nimble software requirements specification and only slightly better at describing what customer’s really want.

What if regardless of our initial input from customers, product owners took Jeff Patton’s advice and focused our initial backlogs on specific, desired and attainable end user goals — not on interactions but why they are valuable to users? What if themes were something other than a less granular stories?

Could we retain this focus through release planning by sizing these themes not by committing to a single path and simple decomposition but by a more complex matrix of possible implementations, classifying how effectively those implementations might meet the end user goal?