That's a very good discussion, I understand totally what you have commented, I agree with you, maybe I was not clear with my point of view and opinion.
It is totally true that value can have different meanings, but here I mean making something better, for example, when we say increasing customer satisfaction, we could measure that by the NPS. When we talk about Usability, we would need another way of measuring the value itself. There are many other variants of value as well.
The hidden problems I mentioned is about ensuring that we are focusing on what matters, in other words, following one of the principles of Agile Manifesto, which is avoiding waste, "simplicity is the art of maximizing the work not done". My opinion here is that we need understand that we are in the right direction, therefore discovering the hidden problems.
When it comes the Sprint Goal I share your opinion on it, there's no doubt that is a commitment from the development team, I agree totally. What I said about guidance is because I have seen so many issues with fuzzy sprint goals that were no well elaborated or inexistent, meaning that the team couldn't function as a team, instead as a group of people, for this reason I mention the guidance, however that is complimentary to the commitment.
I do know that increment delivered at the end of the sprint is what should be measured, because this is what will be part of a future release. When I mentioned about measuring the PBI's result, it is not exactly this, I mean that every PBI should generate value, when we follow the principles behind INVEST, we can reach that. What I want to highlight here is the fact that the PBI should be prepared in a way that will deliver value once it is done, then the other question is how do we ensure that the value was achieved at the end, that we need to measure, the approaches and when to measure will vary, but we should not launch and forget, otherwise how would we inspect and adapt?
And last but not least, when I mentioned "companies", I meant places that implement Scrum or another agile framework still don't have a shared view of what a Product Owner is. I have worked as a PO in 5 different companies and all of them had different opinions of responsibilities and so on. I am totally in favor of following the agile manifesto as well as the Scrum, therefore I am always challenging everywhere I have been to in order to enjoy the benefits of Scrum.
