The Art of Agile Product Ownership : A Guide for Product Managers, Business Analysts, and Entrepreneurs

Every product owner faces a complex and unique set of challenges within their team. This provides each individual the opportunity to fill the role with different ambitions, skills, and insights. Your product ownership journey can take a variety of paths, and The Art of Agile Product Ownership is here to be your guide. Author Allan Kelly, who delivers Agile training courses to major companies, pulls from his experience to help you discover what it takes to be a successful product owner. You will learn how you need to define your role within a team and how you can best incorporate ownership with strategy. With the Agile method, time is the key factor, and after using the lessons from this book you will confidently be able to synthesize features, functionality, and scope against delivery. You will find out how other team members such as the UX designer and business analyst can support and enhance your role as product owner, and how every type of company structure can adapt for optimal agility. The Art of Agile Product Ownership is a beacon for current product owners, programmers who are ready to take the next step towards ownership, and analysts transitioning into the product space. This book helps you determine for yourself the best way to fill the product owner role so that you utilize your unique combination of skills. Product ownership is central to a successful Agile team, and after reading this book, you will be more than ready for the challenge. What You Will Learn • Explores activities the product owner needs to do in order to write good and valuable user stories • Identifies skills product owners can learn from product managers and business analysts • Demonstrates how to make decisions based on business and customer demand rather than technical needs and feasibility Who This Book Is For This is a book for anyone becoming a product owner: developers and programmers, who, after some years at the code-face, are ready to step up to the next stage to own the product that they have been coding. Business Analysts and Product Managers who see themselves transitioning into the a product owner role will find value in this book in understanding their new role and how the work is the same and how it is different Contents 4 About the Author 6 Acknowledgments 7 Prologue 8 Introduction 14 Part I: Meet the Product Owner 18 Chapter 1: What Are You Building? 21 Cost 23 Quality 24 Time 24 People 25 Scope, requirements, “what are we building?” 25 Contrast the Project Manager 26 Chapter 2: Why Have a Product Owner? 27 The Product Owner Delta 29 Single voice 31 Time 33 Work not to do 34 Empathy 34 Tension wanted 35 Not alone 35 Skills 36 Chapter 3: Who Is the Product Owner? 37 Alias Product Owner 39 Product Managers and Business Analysts 40 Project Managers? 40 The problem 41 Modern Product Owner model 42 Mixing roles 44 Chapter 4: Requirements, Discovery, and Demand 46 The rise and fall of requirements 47 Discovery 49 The demand side 50 Changing requirements to discovery 52 Role changes 53 Chapter 5: Every Product Owner Needs Four Things 54 Skills and experience 54 Authority 55 Legitimacy 56 Time 57 Superhuman 58 Chapter 6: Customers, Users, and Stakeholders 59 Customer or user? 60 Stakeholders 60 Different but overlapping 61 Part II: What Product Owners Do? 63 Chapter 7: Scrum and the Product Owner 66 Product Owner vs. Scrum Master 68 Chapter 8: Onstage Product Owner 69 Writing user stories 69 Administering the backlog 70 Prioritizer in chief 70 Working with the team 71 Refining stories 71 3 Amigos 72 Testing 72 Estimating work items 73 And more to do 73 Chapter 9: Offstage Product Owner 74 Types of research 76 Quantitative 76 Qualitative 76 Experimental 77 Quantitative, qualitative, or experimental? 77 Meet with customers 77 Meeting 78 Informal meetings 79 Observe customers 80 Understand the prospective customers 80 Evaluation 81 Other sources 81 Support desk 81 Sales people 82 Competitors 83 Reading and scanning 83 Every Product Owner is different 84 Chapter 10: The Busy Product Owner 85 Chapter 11: Stop Doing 88 No coding 88 No line management 89 Dump outbound marketing 90 Dump pre-sales 91 Avoid the writing trap 91 Chapter 12: Specialist Help 93 Use the team 93 Testing specialist 94 User experience/interface specialists 95 The default dogs’ body 97 Part III: Role Models 98 Chapter 13: Product Owner as Entrepreneur 100 Inspiration 101 The flip side 101 Ownership 102 Chapter 14: The Product Manager Role 104 The dumping ground 105 Inbound and outbound marketing 106 Remember the Product Manager 108 Chapter 15: What Do Product Managers Do? 109 Customers 110 Development team 112 The Market 113 Senior managers and strategy 114 Sales 115 Chapter 16: Changes in Product Management 116 Just do it 117 New research approaches 118 Lean start-up 118 Quantitative vs. Qualitative 120 Internal analysis 120 Design to the forefront 121 Chapter 17: The Business Analyst Role 122 Business Analyst or Product Manager? 123 Analysis 125 Business Analysis maturity model 126 Discovery 127 BA or PO? 128 Chapter 18: Different Types of Business Analysts 129 Non-IT 129 Systems Analyst 130 Technical BAs 131 Business Analyst as Product Manager 131 Subject Matter Expert 132 BA as support 133 Many hats 134 Product Owner or junior Product Manager? 134 Customer and Subject Matter Expert 135 Project Manager 136 Other role models 136 Where do Product Owners come from? 137 Part IV: Challenges 138 Chapter 19: The Product Owner Refactored 140 Strategic and Tactical Product Owners 141 Scaling up 142 TPO as proxy 143 Multiple products 143 Downsides 145 Too many cooks 145 Product Council 148 A reoccurring solution 149 Chapter 20: Changing Hats 150 Chapter 21: Mission Impossible 153 Skills 153 Authority 155 Individual level 156 Misunderstanding the role 157 Time 158 Recognizing the tensions 158 Chapter 22: The End 159 Product Owner maturity model 159 Final words 161 References 163 Index 165 Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii Front Matter ....Pages 1-3 What Are You Building? (Allan Kelly)....Pages 5-10 Why Have a Product Owner? (Allan Kelly)....Pages 11-20 Who Is the Product Owner? (Allan Kelly)....Pages 21-29 Requirements, Discovery, and Demand (Allan Kelly)....Pages 31-38 Every Product Owner Needs Four Things (Allan Kelly)....Pages 39-43 Customers, Users, and Stakeholders (Allan Kelly)....Pages 45-48 Front Matter ....Pages 49-51 Scrum and the Product Owner (Allan Kelly)....Pages 53-55 Onstage Product Owner (Allan Kelly)....Pages 57-61 Offstage Product Owner (Allan Kelly)....Pages 63-73 The Busy Product Owner (Allan Kelly)....Pages 75-77 Stop Doing (Allan Kelly)....Pages 79-83 Specialist Help (Allan Kelly)....Pages 85-89 Front Matter ....Pages 91-92 Product Owner as Entrepreneur (Allan Kelly)....Pages 93-96 The Product Manager Role (Allan Kelly)....Pages 97-101 What Do Product Managers Do? (Allan Kelly)....Pages 103-109 Changes in Product Management (Allan Kelly)....Pages 111-116 The Business Analyst Role (Allan Kelly)....Pages 117-123 Different Types of Business Analysts (Allan Kelly)....Pages 125-133 Front Matter ....Pages 135-136 The Product Owner Refactored (Allan Kelly)....Pages 137-146 Changing Hats (Allan Kelly)....Pages 147-149 Mission Impossible (Allan Kelly)....Pages 151-156 The End (Allan Kelly)....Pages 157-160 Back Matter ....Pages 161-166