Product Owner 101: Reporting and Time Tracking Tips for Beginners

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In the Scrum framework, the Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the product value by delivering features quickly in collaboration with customers, stakeholders, and the Scrum team.

As a Product Owner, your role is not to manage tasks and the daily work of developers, but product backlog management, stakeholder management, and optimizing the work value for the development team.

Implementing time-tracking with the help of effective time tracking apps tailored for agile teams will provide you with detailed insights into key agile metrics, allowing better decision-making and faster time-to-market.

We'll tell you how to make your time tracking perfect.

Top 6 reporting and time-tracking tips 

1. Keep in mind: time-tracking is NOT intended for micro-managing

Business agility is all about efficiency, responding to change, and creating value. The objective of time tracking in agile teams is to understand the roadblocks that affect project success and mitigate them.

If you use time tracking to monitor and manage your team, you are going against the Agile framework. 

2. Show your Scrum Team the value of using a time tracking app

Give your team an overview of the benefits of tracking time and the expected improvements to their daily processes and the project outcome at large. 

Understanding the positive outcomes of custom time tracking software will eliminate any hesitation and make the adoption smoother.

3. Walk the talk

To successfully introduce any new process in an established workflow, you need to lead by example.

Get hands-on experience with the time tracking app to understand potential problems, gauge the benefits, and gather concrete data to help you convince your team of the potential benefits of agile time tracking.

4. Consider the quality of work, not just the quantity

Some tasks create greater value, even if their completion does not take many hours. You must log these short obligations to understand their relation to the project at large and the value they create.

Time tracking apps for agile teams are designed to give insights on value created by tracking story points, capacity, and the relationship between users, epics, projects, and logged hours.

5. Use insights to improve sprint over sprint

Time tracking and reporting apps provide detailed and accurate insights into project status, team capacity, and sprint success. On a user level, they help developers track their time and enhance productivity.

You can generate comprehensive, customizable, and visual reports to track your projects, prioritize information and make intelligent data-backed decisions to improve sprint over sprint.

6. Choose automatic time-tracking apps over manual apps

Agile teams require sophisticated time tracking apps that gather complex data and are still easy to use. A manual time tracking software will do just the opposite and exhaust the time and energies of your Scrum team.

Automatic time trackers build effortlessly on top of your project management tools, like Jira, for example, and work in the background without requiring much input from the users.

If you are beginning your career as a Product Owner, a robust time tracking app will help you manage your teams and projects effectively, meet project goals on time, and deliver exceptional value every iteration. 

The reporting features of custom time tracking apps will provide you with invaluable insights, enhanced visibility, and accurate data to improve future sprint plannings, Scrum Team performance and serve as a huge asset for effective stakeholder management.

[Abel O]

Hey Andreas!
what time tracking app would you best recommend for a beginner PO?

[Adaeze_Jude_HEROCODERS]

Hello Abel,

I would suggest Clockwork Automated time tracking and Timesheets.

Clockwork provides you with manual and automatic time-tracking abilities.

When automated timers are enabled, Clockwork will record the time that an assignee has an issue in an active status, and use this with the working hours to calculate the time worked. Automatic timers ensure that all work is logged, without users having to take any actions.

Please see our documentation for more details on Automatic timers. 

Clockwork also provides you with exciting features like Timesheet reports that allow you to filter by multiple factors including projects, users, issue types, and other components that can allow you to view over-timers and under-timers.

Let us know if you wish to talk more here.