The Professional Product Owner

Book excerpt: The role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it's about much more than mechanics: it's about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You'll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximise it throughout your entire product lifecycle. Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework. McGreal and Jocham discuss strategy, showing how to connect Vision, Value, and Validation in ROI-focused agile product management. They lay out Scrum best-practices for managing complexity and continuously delivering value, and they define the concrete practices and tools you can use to manage Product Backlogs and release plans, all with the goal of making you a more successful Product Owner. Throughout, the authors share revealing personal experiences that illuminate obstacles to success and show how they can be overcome. Define success from the "outside in," using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximise value Fill the "product management vacuum" by bringing empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner's role Align everyone behind a shared model of how to create, deliver, and capture value Use Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce risk Effectively apply Scrum's Product Owner role, artefacts, and events Populate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specifications Plan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debt Scale your product, not your Scrum Use Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team's work