- Value in the scrum guide is mentioned constantly. But it can often be a fairly abstract concept. So, what is value in scrum? And how do you deliver value? The scrum guide states that the product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the development team. Using the product as a reference, you can use value as a measure of the benefit of a product backlog item. High value items can help set the priority of backlog items. Okay. Value can often be very subjective as individuals often value different things with different levels of importance. Given this, value should be considered as to what the highest min value available is. Figuring out what the highest value items are, means collaborating with your users, customers and stakeholders, to see what thing about your product vision, your users as a whole may engage with most. There might be a minority who really value a particular obscure thing and something that is much more general that a much bigger majority find as having medium value. The item that is of medium value to more people will likely generate more value on the whole than one small obscure thing. When you've managed to figure out what items are most valuable, a number of important factors become available to a product owner. Value provides focus, value focuses the effort of the development team on what is important. Valuable PBI's get prioritized. Setting the value of user stories is instrumental in prioritizing the product backlog. Value enables alignment. The value should align user stories with the vision and product strategy. It removes waste. PBI's of lower value are lower priority and less likely to be implemented which prevents wasted effort. Value provides return on investment. Return on investment can be an important factor when estimating value. Value may change during product development and that is absolutely okay. The feedback loop of scrum provides the product owner continuous feedback. This is useful to keep the value of PBIs correct and current. Well, you can't really. Another way of thinking of value is that it is multi-dimensional. You want to try and capture contributing factors to value as much as possible. This includes looking at market value. Market value is broken into two types, Open Market Value, OMV, and Fair Market Value, FMV. OMV is the market value of an asset if auctioned in a competitive environment whereas FMV is the price that a company would receive on the open market, assuming there is a willing buyer. Commercial value is important to stakeholders and shareholders. This is most often recognized as the stock value of the company. There are numerous factors involved in commercial value like branding, which can be effective in motivating customers to purchase products and increase return on investment, ROI. For example, Rolex highly values features that perpetuate their brand as a provider of luxury accessories. Then you have Expected Commercial Value, ECV. ECV is the Net Project Value, NPV, of the project. Which goes alongside Risk-Adjusted NPV, RNPV. Adjusts NPV for risks probability based on probable cashflow models for the project. Customer value. Customers are typically more utilitarian in assigning product value. Factors like the quality of product, product benefits, availability of products and so on affect the value customers assign. Future value which can be considered in product value. Predicting the future, including future value always poses some risk. Competitive advantage. Does the killer feature of the product have an advantage over competitors in the market. If so, this will really add value to the product. Likely both commercial and customer value. Value can be difficult to define. But when you do find what is most valuable for your product, it can really help add clarity and focus to it.