The following resources have been hand-picked to provide Product Owners with some of the better resources available to assist you in your role. These are also relevant to ScrumMasters in their capacity of being of service in helping a Product Owner to grow and be effective.
Product Owner overview
- Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell (15:51) – an excellent summary of Scrum Product Ownership by Henrik Kniberg. We explore this and related material in-depth on Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) courses.
- Passionate Product Ownership (online slides) – a Product Owner course with strong User Centric Design bent courtesy of Jeff Patton and Aaron Sanders. There is a lot of good content on Story Mapping in here.
Career Paths
- What is Product Management? by Roman Pichler discussing Product Manager, Product Owner and other roles. This may help with delineating between the Product Owner role and others that cover aspects of the Pragmatic Marketing Framework
- Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) @ J.P. Morgan – See second half for career path related topics
- Role of Manager
Visions
- Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species – Elon Musk’s vision is not just about getting to Mars.
- Knowledge Navigator (5:33) – a long term vision from 1987. It’s interesting to consider the impact that this vision has had on smart phones, tablets and other technology that we use every day.
- A Day Made of Glass (5:32) and A Day Made of Glass 2 (5:58) – one of a series of envisioning pieces from Corning who make the ‘Gorilla Glass’ on iPhones.
Impact Mapping
- Getting the most out of impact mapping – Gojko Adzic, Ingrid Domingues & Johan Berndtsson
- ImpactMapping.org
Product Roadmapping and Strategy
- The Product Roadmap and the Release Plan
- 10 Tips for creating and Agile Product Roadmap
- GO Product Roadmap
- What is Good Product Strategy? – Melissa Perri
- Book: Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age – Roman Pichler (author of the first book soley on the Scrum Product Owner role)
User Stories
- User Stories, Epics and Themes by Mike Cohn.
- Splitting User Stories by Richard Lawrence and Peter Green.
- Two Examples of Splitting Epics by Mike Cohn – includes an example of building up a complex calculation algorithm incrementally.
- The Art of Splitting Features and Epics into Playable Stories by Tarang Baxi (53:50) – case studies of spliting stories for some complex projects.
Acceptance Criteria
- On Acceptance Criteria for User Stories article by Sandy Mamoli.
Specification by Example
- Specification by Example: Key Ideas – Gojko Adzic, co-author of the book “Specification By Example”.
- BDD in the large – Liz Keogh
- Introducing BDD – Dan North, BDD pioneer.
- The Agile Testing Pyramid – Roger Brown
Story Mapping
- Stop-motion video of a Story map by Lachlan Heasman.
- Story Mapping mirrored electronically with CarBoard tool (6:58) – featuring David Hussman
- Revisiting the Iterative Incremental Mona Lisa by Steven Thomas
- The Neglected Practice of Iteration by Jeff Patton.
- User Story Mapping book by Jeff Patton
MVP and MMP
- The Minimum Viable Product and the Minimal Marketable Product – Roman Pichler
- Dropbox video (4:39) – that YouTube video was their actual MVP as it validated a critical business hypothesis at the time i.e. whether where was sufficient interest in the market for the Dropbox product
- Lean Startup Principles
- Building a Minimum Viable Product? You’re Probably Doing it Wrong – Harvard Business Review
- Minimum Lovable Product – Matt Johnson
Product Backlog Management
- Articles on Product Backlog Management from Roman Pichler
- A JIRA List Is Not A Scrum Product Backlog – good tips on how to get a big mess of issues into a quality product backlog.
Backlog ordering techniques
- Cost of Delay. See the excellent Understanding Cost of Delay video (2:57) – This is a powerful technique for ordering Product Backlog Items and collections of such PBIs including themes and Epic Stories. This technique encourages us to establish an economic framework around our product development. Such an economic framework is discussed in Essential Scrum by Kenneth Rubin. To see how this can be used in practice at a portfolio management level, I recommend the paper Black Swan Farming using Cost of Delay (mobi or ePub download).
- Theme Scoring tool from Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software. Also see “Multi-attribute Utility Analysis”
- Eisenhower Matrix – can be used to order Product Backlog Items in terms of Importance and Urgency. A simple general-purpose explanation can be found in this video narrated by British actor Alexander Perkins.
- Business Value Game – like Planning Poker but for value rather than effort.
- Innovation Games – there are dozens of ‘serious’ games described here and most of them have something to do with rapid qualitative market or stakeholder research in a manner that may be useful for Product Owners. Some of the most relevant ones include “Prune the Product Tree” for product road mapping and “Buy a Feature” for prioritisation. I am a trained Innovation Games Facilitator. If you give any of these a go at work, I’d be very interested in hearing about your experience.
- Success and Quality Sliders (PDF) – Success sliders, Quality sliders (slightly adapted from Rob Thomsett) plus a Trade-off Matrix.
Progress Tracking
- Understanding the Burndown Chart in Scrum (3:47)
- Velocity Range Calculator – Input a set of velocity data points to produce a forecast. Includes an explanation of the formula used.
Scrum related humour
- The Impatient Product Owner (3:24)
- Scrum debuts on HBO’s Silicon Valley (work-friendly version 2:17) Also Pied Piper burndown chart.
- Could you use a crystal ball for risk management? (1:46)
- Scope Creep – Project Management (9:58)
