product owner | Scrum Agile Project Management Expert

The ScrumMaster Is Not a Project Manager

September 11, 2012 0

In this article, Steve Hunton explains that, even if people expect that the shift to Agile practices includes a wholesale shift of roles,, the ScrumMaster does not play the part of the traditional project manager. He thinks that the project manager role is more filled by the product owner. The project manager is a decision maker accountable to the business for accomplishing the project objectives. The ScrumMaster is a coach and facilitator that sits between the project and the customer. He isn’t responsible for the project or managing the development team. If you have questions about the product, then you should ask it to the product owner. He concludes that if the ScrumMaster is making decisions about a product, then Scrum has not been properly implemented and there’s going to be confusion and conflict about who does and owns what.

Moving a Backlog Item to Done

May 16, 2012 0

This article discusses the the role of the Product Owner in moving a backlog item to done. It explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent.

Sprint Are not Just for User Stories

April 17, 2012 0

How do you manage activities that don’t seem directly related to features in your Scrum sprints? This blog post discusses why it is a problem when Scrum teams start to wonder about having time to manage infrastructure, technical debt or test framework. For Johanna Rothman this is the sign that the culture is not Agile enough and that the product owner doesn’t want to take iteration time to schedule anything other than features in an iteration. She offers seven hints on how to improve this situation, saying that product owners that don’t want to fund technical debt will instead create more of it.

Product Owner or Ownership

January 3, 2012 0

In this blog post, Pawel Brodzinski discusses the problem of the Product Role in Scrum teams. It is not always possible of having a client representative working closely with a project team. So the team should sometimes find other ways to get answer questions about the product and fill the product ownership activity. His conclusion is that knowing what is important to build is the essence of product ownership. A good Product Owner is only one way to achieve this objective.

Scrum Expectation Line

November 14, 2011 0

The Scrum Expectation Line is defined by Zsolt Fabók as the line that follows the expectations of the Product Owner during each sprint. In this blog post, he discusses the difference between the team capacity to deliver and what the Product Owner wants in each Sprint and explains how his team deals with it.

Full-time Scrum

August 31, 2011 0

in this blog post, John Piekos explains how the ScrumMaster and Product Owner roles in Scrum are much more demanding than the Project and Product Manager roles of traditional project approaches. With frequent “potentially shippable product increments”, he believes that full-time effort is required from all members in order to be successful.

The Product Owner’s Guide to Saying No

August 8, 2011 0

Product owners are under a lot of pressure. On one side, customers, stakeholders and users provide a constant stream of requests and demands. On the other side, developers own their estimates and commitments. It’s easy to take on too much work and resort to heroic prioritisation to try to make things fit. This video gives to Scrum product owners several ideas on how to adapt their product management process to increase quality.