The Professional Product Owner’s Guide to Maximizing Value with Scrum

“This book presents a method of communicating our desires, cogently, coherently, and with a minimum of fuss and bother.”

—Ken Schwaber, Chairman & Founder, Scrum.org

The role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it’s about much more than mechanics: it’s about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You’ll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximize it throughout your entire product lifecycle.

Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework.

McGreal and Jocham discuss strategy, showing how to connect Vision, Value, and Validation in ROI-focused agile product management. They lay out Scrum best-practices for managing complexity and continuously delivering value, and they define the concrete practices and tools you can use to manage Product Backlogs and release plans, all with the goal of making you a more successful Product Owner. Throughout, the authors share revealing personal experiences that illuminate obstacles to success and show how they can be overcome.

• Define success from the “outside in,” using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximize value
• Bring empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner’s role, and align everyone behind a shared business model
• Use Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce risk
• Effectively apply Scrum’s Product Owner role, artifacts, and events
• Populate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specifications
• Plan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debt
• Scale your product, not your Scrum
• Use Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team’s work

Whatever your role in product management or agile development, this guide will help you deliver products that offer more value, more rapidly, and more often.

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Don McGreal, in his role as VP of Learning Solutions at Improving (improving.com), is a hands-on agile consultant and instructor. He specializes in agile coaching at the enterprise and product management levels within larger organizations. Don is a Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer who has authored and taught classes for thousands of software professionals around the globe. He is also co-founder of TastyCupcakes.org, a comprehensive collection of games and exercises for accelerating the adoption of agile principles. Don is a course steward for the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner course taught around the world.

 

Ralph Jocham is a German citizen who spent the last 20 years collecting professional software and product development experience in France, the UK, the USA, and now Switzerland. He became an Agile evangelist in 2000 and perfected his approach at ThoughtWorks. Ralph also is Europe’s first trainer with Scrum.org and has taught thousands of professionals around the globe. When not busy running his company, Effective Agile (effectiveagile.com), or helping all kinds of enterprises in Europe, he enjoys teaching at universities. Ralph nevertheless finds time to spend quality time with his family on a regular basis, treating them to home-cooked international fine cuisine and going on long walks with the family dog. Ralph is a course steward for the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner course taught around the world.

1. Agile Product Management
2. Strategy and Vision
3. Empiricism
4. Value
5. Product Backlog Management
6. Release Management
7. Scaling