Product Ownership

A 1 day product ownership course compressed into 15 minute animated presentation.

Quite simply, one of the best videos on Agile. Henrik Kniberg is able to condense an entire day course into a 15 minute well done primer on the agile role and responsibilities of a Product Owner. It summarizes the key points of agile software development, providing an excellent overview covering stories, prioritization, planning and scaling. A timeless video that should be watched by everyone in the agile world.

The basics of story mapping and how to scope a minimum viable product.

Story mapping is the part of the complex product management process where define what the problem is and why it exists. In this article, Christian Strunk shares how he used to create story maps and how he teaching others to execute them these days. You will learn the basics, and three levels of a user story map, along with how to build it in with a lean-agile mentality.

Looking at what it means to bring a focused, valuable Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to market.

All too often, products are brought to market with a feature-first approach. A list of functions that are needed to meet business goals such as sign-ups or downloads, views or shares. There’s little thought that’s gone into who the user of the product will be, what their goals are, and what it will take to provide meaningful value to them. We’ll look at what it means to bring a focused, valuable Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to market. An MVP that can help you learn how to better serve your users, and the business that’s footing the bill.

Epics have taken on a variety of meanings in software development.

Writing a definition for epic isn’t nearly as simple as it should be. The term "epic" has taken on multiple meanings as it is used in different environments, and when it comes to dealing with the team's backlog those disparate meanings can cause quite a bit of confusion. Kent McDonald shares what he sees as the most common interpretations of epics, and what he has found to be the best way to deal with the misunderstandings.

A complete guide to User Stories and how to use them to drive thoughtful, collaborative, adaptive product development.

This article will show you how to create better user stories. You’ll learn how to write them like a designer, test them like an entrepreneur, and use them to drive better discussions like an agile coach.

Learn how to create a powerful agile product roadmap that helps you describe how your product is likely to grow and aligns the stakeholders.

A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. In this episode, I share ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.

Understanding what done means in Scrum and how your (DoD) Definition of Done determines the quality of your final product.

The Definition of Done is one of the most important concepts in Scrum. In this article Daria Bagina helps us understand what done means in Scrum, what a done product really is, and explains how your Definition of Done (DoD), greatly influences the quality of your final product as a team or organization. This article goes into detail on how to create your Definition of Done, how to use is as a guide, and motivates you to review your own DoD practices.

The Product Owner ensures that there is a Product Backlog, that it is ordered, and that it is made available to both the Scrum Team and stakeholders.

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve complex problems with an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths.

Visualizations to help you understand & communicate key product mgt. ideas.

Through the use of graphical visualizations, Curtis Stanier identifies 6 common product management conceptual mistakes. The usage of visuals is surprisingly helpful in understanding what the issues actually are, and a hint of how to properly apply the concept is given for each of the 6 themes.

Learn how to create a powerful agile product roadmap that helps you describe how your product is likely to grow and aligns the stakeholders.

A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. This post shares ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.

Arguing that estimation is a bad thing, particularly in the Agile world, and presents ways to plan that don't involve estimation.

Presenting Allen Holub's thinking (and many other's) thinking about #NoEstimates.

Analyzing wether its a good idea to break Product Backlog Items (PBIs) down into tasks or not.

Why do over 60% of Agile teams breakdown their work into a Sprint Backlog and is it okay to decompose work into units? Tristan Libersat in this article explains whether it's effective to simplify work into tasks in a bid to achieve organizational goals. He notes that the Sprint Backlog includes both the Product Backlog Items (PBIs) and the plan on how to execute them to achieve the Product Increment or goal of the Sprint Review, basing on the Scrum Guide.

The whole point of the user story could be just to trigger a useful discussion.

In an interesting thought process, Daniel Pokrývka breaks down the user story artifact into its elements to identify the essential parts which can be captured. Then, in an attempt to generate a meta-template, priority is given to the value and motivation, then to the usage and user contexts, and finally to the problem. This results in a value story template, or a different approach to understanding user stories.

Understanding the what and the why of User Stories from a talk that is still one of the best explanations of it out there.

An explanation of what agile requirements are, to help you writing and using user stories.

Agile requirements evolve through the lifetime of a product, since it is not possible to know all of them at inception. In this article, Alex Gray outlines what they are, how they are written and handled for emergent designs. He add tips for writing user stories, it's format and how to know if they are ready for development. You will learn how to outline your requirements in a clear, efficient and effective way.

Writing good user stories is harder than it sounds.

User Stories have the familiar format: "As a 'user' I want to 'perform an action' so I can 'achieve an end result'". This format is so to help product, design, and engineering folks in taking a user-centered approach to design. Janet Taylor proposes that simply relying in this format is not enough, as it is easily misunderstood and misused. The purpose of user stories is to create empathy, and she tells you what to do instead.

Discussing the expected behavior of a product to prepare a development increment.

User Stories, the description of the next feature increment, are often best seen as a placeholder for a conversation. This conversation should take into consideration all the needed perspectives in order to make informed decisions, contrasting business, technical and quality issues as it progresses. Kent McDonald shares concepts from Behavior-Driven Development BDD to shed a light on what, when and who should be included.

Learn how a team was able to heal a small part of the business/development divide by listening to users and delivering small incremental work.

Incremental delivery is a concept where value is delivered in stages instead of as a single increment. Steve Kuo shares a real life example as to the difference this approach makes, and how it can improve trust and engagement of the end users. By delivering features that the users leveraged every day, small ideas became big improvements and change became intuitive. A very relatable example of how to evolve simple solutions by increments.

Acronyms to help us create and remind us of the good characteristics of stories and project tasks.

Bill Wake notes that good user stories act like a pidgin language by simplifying a system for the customers to collaborate with the developers and work together towards the ultimate software goal. However, which characteristics define a good user story and the effectiveness of the tasks within the user story? The author explains the characteristics of the acronym INVEST and SMART in detail here citing how XP teams should use them to create a good software user story with effective tasks.

A technique for splitting user stories that helps teams view things from their comfort zone.

Learn how to use a technique to split user stories into smaller stories that help teams to visualise business workflows from different perspectives. It details six key steps of applying the User Story Hamburger that helps inexperienced teams break down stories into smaller tasks that still deliver incremental business value. The Hamburger method works well to teams that insist on breaking down a story into technical workflow or component tasks by helping them embrace division of stories into more achievable steps.

The definitive guide to splitting features & stories, including the latest versions of Richard Lawrence's popular story splitting flowchart.

The article outlines a definitive guide to splitting features & stories, including the latest versions of Richard Lawrence's popular story splitting flowchart. It gives us an in-depth understanding of user stories and why splitting them matters. Within the context, it details that splitting user stories into smaller valuable/manageable pieces allows teams to get high-quality feedback from the user's perspective. Read this guide to learn more about splitting user stories, attributes of good user stories, and how to compare them to vertical slides.

How to use vertical user story slicing as part of software development and agile scrum adoption.

Kim Poremski narrates how she worked with a Product Owner to improve efficiency in a team's backlog that relied on horizontally structured user stories by transforming them into vertical slices. Together, they defined vertically sliced features and stories that allowed the team to demonstrate incremental progress and achieve better outcomes. She adds that horizontal stories do not meet a well-informed story structure of role, functionality, and outcome as well as the INVEST criteria.

Using a combination of three roadmap practices

Product roadmaps are a great way to track progress, manage expectations, keep people informed and aligned, while fostering transparency. But often the roadmap gets overloaded with features instead of focusing on a high-level, strategic plan for the products' future development. Robbin Schuurman presents three different roadmap practices, with the pros and cons of each, and how to mix them together depending on your needs.

151 tools to strategically prioritize initiatives with tons of linked resources for your inspiration.

In this post, Jordan Lamborn provides 155 feature prioritization ideas for product managers. The frameworks include the agreement and certainty matrix, impact vs effort, values vs feasibility, among many others and all contain tons of linked resources.

Eight alternatives ways to represent and manage your product backlog to make it more impactful.

The Product Backlog tends to grow, seemingly exponentially, as the product matures and more users enter the system. With more and more cases to handle, it becomes essential to groom the backlog in different ways depending on context. Anthony Murphy shares 8 different ways you can organize your backlog to get the visualization that you need for every situation. Each organization illuminates clarity onto the backlog from a different perspective.

Defining the goals of a product to understand what value means and how to decide what to deliver and when.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman looks at many aspects that define a product and its goals. She addresses some of the questions around what value means and how value is critical to deciding on what to deliver for the product and when.

Creating an MVP through iterative delivery and constant customer feedback.

Concepts around handling complexity in Agile at scale.

In a very quick overview of what is a team backlog and how to effectively manage it, the SAFe team explains the basic concepts of handling team tasks. Besides defining what the team backlog is and how to handle it, this article explains how to optimize value delivery and system health with capacity allocation, and how to handle backlog refinement.

Maintaining a suitably detailed, one year rolling roadmap - progressively disclosing options/solutions.

Roadmaps define a project's goals and major deliverables (milestones) in a given timeline. They show what the project is to deliver now, next, in the near future, and later on. However, how would you best know the most viable feature to roll out to the customers through the project's timeline? John Cutler believes that teams leveraging 'suitably detailed roadmap items', are more likely to deliver the most viable solution to the customers. Such Roadmaps contain multiple options regarding one issue that the team tries as a solution to prioritize one as the main option.

The Sprint Backlog is flexible, as long as changes do not distract from the focus on the Sprint Goal.

Do Development Teams commit — essentially promise — to complete all the items on the Product Backlog each sprint? Can new insights during the Sprint result in changes to the Sprint Backlog? Or is it fixed? This post by Christiaan Verwijs addresses the myth that the Sprint Backlog is fixed during the Sprint. It makes the case that the Sprint Backlog is flexible, as long as changes do not distract from the focus on the Sprint Goal.

Enabling a holistic response to learning insights by focusing on a daily rhythm of reviewing what is for Now, Next and Later.

Detailed planning creates comfort and a sense of being in control, but it is ultimately an illusion. Smaller, frequent panning helps us adapt to future changes as it simplifies and improves the way we embrace these changes. Todd Lankford shares a three planning framework - The Now, Then, and later which helps make the planning easier to adopt by following a hierarchy of needs for the backlog refinement. Carrying out the work in daily batches reduce the number of future refinements as well as give rise to new ideas ensuring targets are met.