Product Owner Resources

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

Visions

Impact Mapping

Product Roadmapping and Strategy

User Stories

Acceptance Criteria

Specification by Example

Story Mapping

MVP and MMP

Product Backlog Management

 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

Scrum related humour