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Scrum Product Ownership

Scrum Product Ownership, 3'rd Edition

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Scrum Product Ownership, 3'rd Edition

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share some great news. I’ve just completed the 3’rd Edition of my Scrum Product Owner book.

It’s been a true labor of love that’s taken far longer to finish then I’d originally expected. (sounds like software products, right?) But, to quote a common agile phrase…I am now…

DONE.

Stick a fork in it, Baby!

E-copies (PDF, EPUB, and MOBI) are all available immediately on LeanPub. What’s nice about connecting via LeanPub is that I plan on continuing to evolve content & ideas in the PDF, so it will be a way to “stay in touch” with any future developments of the books’ themes.

Also not that I’ve published several short PDF, blog link books that make it easy to explore my blog posts on 3-specific topics:

  • Agile Coaching

  • Agile Leadership

  • Product Ownership

More information on ALL of the LeanPub copies can be found here: https://leanpub.com/bookstore?search=Robert%20Galen

Amazon

You can find the paper version here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/098850264X/

And the Kindle version here: https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Product-Ownership-Navigating-Forest-ebook/dp/B07PBGN5NW/

And here’s a link to my Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00287V534/

Previous Owners Offer

I’d like to make the following offer for ALL Edition 1 and Edition 2 book owners. If you’ve previously purchased a paper or e-copy of my two previous editions, I’ll give you a free e-copy of the 3’rd Edition. All you have to do is drop me a note and I’ll forward you a coupon for LeanPub to get your copy.

Wrapping Up

It’s been a long time in coming, but I’m incredibly pleased with the results. I hope you pick up a copy of the new book and hope even more so that it provides value to you.

And if you do read it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It means so much to me to gain feedback.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Finding Your Rhythm as Product Owner

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Finding Your Rhythm as Product Owner

Scrum is all about rhythms. Teams that are successful with Scrum establish a sustainable cadence for collaborating with each other. Each of the sprint ceremonies help us move toward our goal, and remind us what’s coming next.

Scrum is pretty straightforward about how to establish the right rhythms for the team, but organizing your work as a product owner is a little murkier. You know that sprint planning happens every two weeks, but what do you need to do to prepare? Your team does backlog refinement for an hour every week, but how far in advance do you need to start working on stories to make that meeting worthwhile?

In this article, I’ll share the rhythms that have worked well for me as a product owner. The Scrum ceremonies act as a trigger – a reminder that there’s something I need to do. I’ll organize this article by those triggers, and we’ll work our way backward to see what we need to do to prepare.

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Everyone wants to be a Product Owner until…

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Everyone wants to be a Product Owner until…

Until they realize that:

They have to sometimes say NO to some stakeholders;

They have to make decisions; short term vs. long term; tactical vs. strategic; now vs. later;

They have to peer into the future and anticipate customer needs;

They have to aggregate opinions from multiple, sometimes very powerful and unique, voices;

They have to trust their teams;

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Product Owners ... Stop Bullying Your Teams

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Product Owners ... Stop Bullying Your Teams

I was in a Backlog Refinement meeting the other day and you would have thought I was in divorce court where the parties were negotiating (fighting for) everything.

Each time the team asked clarifying questions around a user story, the Product Owner would begrudgingly answer. It felt like they thought they were wasting time trying to explore the story.

It was clear that what he really wanted was…an estimate.

So the team felt the pressure and stopped asking question. Instead they went immediately into Planning Poker for each story. And as you might expect, the estimates were sort of…all over the place.

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Measuring Product Ownership – What does “Good” look like?

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Measuring Product Ownership – What does “Good” look like?

In 2009 I first published Scrum Product Ownership. In 2013, I followed it up with a second edition. The book has been a popular read for those who are looking for a solid overview of what it takes to be a competent and craft-focused Product Owner.

Here’s what a new Product Owner from Spotify had to say about the book:

“I was recommended your book “Scrum Product Ownership - Balancing Value from the Inside Out” by senior colleagues at Spotify as the one book to read when new to product owning. After recently finishing reading it, I fully agree and will keep recommending your book to anyone getting started as a product owner.

I just wanted to say thank you for making the start of the ride less bumpy and for great advice that I will keep returning to as I gain experience.”

I share this because it helps to set the stage for this article and where my inspiration lies.

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Why the Scrum Product Owner IS a Project Manager

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Why the Scrum Product Owner IS a Project Manager

On the surface, this statement appears as if I’ve lost my mind. For one thing, a traditional view to Product Owners is as a Product Manager or customer/business stakeholder-facing role. And the traditional Project Manager is more so a planning and execution focused role. The two are quite far apart and seem to have little synergy.

The other factor is traditional versus agile contexts.

There are no “traditional” Product Owners. Usually a Product Manager is in essentially the role but it’s very outwardly and upwardly facing. Once the requirements are “signed off”, they’re not that interested in collaborating with the team until the end of the project.

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Anchoring your Product Backlogs

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Anchoring your Product Backlogs

If you don’t know, I’ve got some opinions about Scrum, the Product Owner role, Backlogs, and User Stories. I’ve written a book about Product Ownership and I spend a great deal of my time up to my eyeballs in stories and backlogs at various clients.

One of the things that frustrates those clients is that there are very few “prescriptive rules or firm guidance” when it comes writing stories and crafting Product Backlogs; in many ways, it’s more art than science. It’s also a practiced skill that gets better the more you actually do it—of course as a team, which is also true of agile estimation.

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10 Indicators that you don’t understand Agile Requirements

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10 Indicators that you don’t understand Agile Requirements

I presented at a local professional group the other evening. I was discussing Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), but started the session with an overview of User Stories. From my perspective, the notion of User Stories was introduced with Extreme Programming as early as 2001. So they’ve been in use for 10+ years. Mike Cohn wrote his wonderful book, User Stories Applied in 2004. So again, we’re approaching 10 years of solid information on the User Story as an agile requirement artifact.

My assumption is that most folks nowadays understand User Stories, particularly in agile contexts. But what I found in my meeting is that folks are still struggling with the essence of a User Story. In fact, some of the questions and level of understandings shocked me. But then when I thought about it, most if not all of the misunderstanding surrounds using user stories, but treating them like traditional requirements. So that experienced inspired me to write this article.

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Technical Product Ownership

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Technical Product Ownership

I hear this challenge over and over again from Product Owners. They have little to no problem writing functional User Stories, but then…

Bob, the team is placing tremendous pressure on me to write technology centric User Stories. For example, stories focused on refactoring, or architectural evolution, or even bug fixing. While I’d love to do it, every time I give them to the team and we discuss them, they nit-pick the contents and simply push back saying they can’t even estimate them in their current state.
So I’m stuck in a vicious cycle of rinse & repeat until the team gets frustrated and pulls an ill-defined story into a sprint. And this normally “blows up” the sprint. What can I do?

I think the primary root cause of this problem is that the company views the Product Owner role as the final arbiter of user stories; meaning they need to write them all. I feel that’s an anti-pattern myself, but the question remains, what to do in this situation.

I’ve seen several clients apply approaches that significantly helped in handling, what I refer to here, as technical user stories. Let me share a couple of real-world stories (nor user stories mind you ;-) that should help you envision some alternatives.

 

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Scrum Product Ownership: Study Guide, v1.0

This blog post, which will actually become a “series” as I keep adding references to it, was inspired by Bhavani Rao. Bhavani is a Product Manager who lives in my neighborhood. He’s trying to make the transition to Agile Product Management (Ownership) and is finding it difficult to gain entry without real world experience. So a catch-22 if you will.

The focus of this blog is to provide a lean (but robust) set of references for “would be” Scrum Product Owners and “newbie” Product Owners to help them in their journey. But don’t expect it to be easy or to only read a few blog posts. The role of Product Owner is deep, broad, challenging and downright intimidating. That is – if you want to be GREAT.

I hope you do and I hope this helps…

Bhavani – this one’s for you ;-)

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