More than XP. More than one day.

Product owners and other customer representatives play a crucial role in agile methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming: Product owners are responsible for creating the product vision, writing user stories and stocking the product backlog, reviewing work results at the end of the iteration, and creating the release plan. This is where theory stops for most projects. In reality, product owners are overworked and difficult to get hold of. They are often poorly trained in agile and are sometimes uncomfortable to work closely with a bunch of techies. Often product owners are not properly empowered by their managers. At the same time, there is a strong correlation between effective product owners, successful products, and healthy projects. Not having an effective product owner tends to result in suboptimal outcomes. The objective of this clinic is to gain a common understanding of wide-spread reoccurring product owner issues and their causes. We will identify ways to overcome the causes and to develop effective product owners that drive healthy agile projects.

Process/ format

After a brief introduction to the subject ensuring that everyone has a common understanding of the product owner role, we will gather the relevant data by brainstorming common product owner issues. We will group the issues into semantically related clusters, and prioritise the clusters. The attendees will then select themselves into subgroups. Each subgroup will identify the causes of the issues in its cluster and investigate ways to overcome the causes resulting in concrete measures. The results will be documented on flipcharts. The subgroups will the present their results to the overall group where they are discussed and summarised. We expect to have flipcharts with concrete results available after the session. At the end of the session we will hold a brief retrospective reviewing the session and its results.

Timetable (For 90 min)

Welcome and introduction: 10 min Gather data: 15 min Work in subgroups: 30 min Presentation of the results developed by each subgroup and joint discussion including documenting the results on flipcharts: 25 min Retrospective: 10 min

Benefits of attending

Attendees will benefit from developing concrete improvement measures how to improve the work on their agile project by improving how the product owner role is applied.

The way in which the audience is involved and what they will learn

The attendees will learn hands-on by reflecting on their own software development projects and how the application of the product owner role can be improved.

Session history

The session is also presented at the Scrum Gathering in London.