Scrum Agile Project Management

Things Product Managers Should Know About Being a Product Owner

The product owner is one of the three roles of the Scrum framework for Agile project management. The product owner is responsible for defining and prioritizing the backlog and to convey the product vision to the Scrum team. Some people have compared this role to the traditional product manager position, but the context is different.In her blog post, Ellen Gottesdiener shares nine things that every product manager should know about being an Agile product owner.

These nine hints for the new product owner are:
1. Put the Ends before the Means.
2. Share what you are learning from your customer visits, research, feedback, and interactions
3. Attend the daily stand-ups.
4. Make yourself available every day to answer questions about work in progress.
5. Attend to the team’s retrospectives.
6. Don’t relegate decisions about what features to build and when to the engineering team.
7. Think small: small slices and small tests for small slices with clearly defined desired outcomes.
8. Sketch out the long view of the product to establish a common focus.
9. Use a roadmap as a guide, but don’t freeze it.

The conclusion is that product managers make great product owners. Ellen Gottesdiener says that “At their core, being a product owner (a.k.a. product champion) means doing what great product managers do naturally: lead a team toward a vision, in small steps, with regular stops along the way to check in, adjust, and move forward.”

Read the complete blog post on http://ebgconsulting.com/blog/9-things-every-product-manager-should-know-about-being-an-agile-product-owner/