As I launch into this new series I’m calling Agility, I had planned to begin with one or two ‘big picture’ postings about the Agile Manifesto and core principles. I still plan to write these posts soon, but if you follow me on Twitter (@asbiv) you might have noticed that an issue came up at… Continue reading Balancing Act: Who decides when new features are ready?
We’ve come at last to number ten on my top ten list of the core responsibilities of effective product owners in an Agile software development environment. In this set of posts I have talked about the image of product owners as bridges connecting the intelligence of the market with the resources of technology to create… Continue reading Know your product intimately
In my last blog post I wrote about how the product owner facilitates good decision-making when the team faces the need to make tradeoffs. This time I want to talk about another challenging responsibility for strong product owners: protecting the development team from unhelpful distractions. Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that perhaps… Continue reading Protect the team
For the past seven weeks or so I have been sharing my top ten list of the core responsibilities of effective product owners in an Agile software development environment. I started by discussing the crucial need for communicating with the product manager, because when the roles of product owner and product manager are split this can… Continue reading Handling tradeoffs
I wrote last time about the key role of strong communication between product owners and product managers. As I continue with the second of my ‘top ten responsibilities of product owners’ I want to focus on telling stories. Great product owners translate the market knowledge gathered by product managers into concise stories that developers can… Continue reading Tell stories
I started this new set of blog postings about the top ten responsibilities of great product owners by talking about the role of strong product managers. I know that in some product organizations one person plays both of these roles, balancing her time and energy among the many strategic and tactical tasks that link engineers… Continue reading Communication is key
As I mentioned in my most recent blog posting, for the next set of blogs I write I want to talk about the top ten things that effective product owners do. If you’ve been following this blog you know that (at least from my perspective) there are quite a few things that product owners think… Continue reading The role of product managers
In a well-functioning Agile development team, the members of the team collaborate in multiple ways during a given development cycle or Sprint. Coders, testers, designers, and product owners work closely with each other to ensure that the most important features and fixes are worked on in the right way at the right time, also bringing… Continue reading Know your role
I wrote earlier that one of the key ways to think about the role of product owners is to say that we stand on a bridge connecting the voice of the market with the world of the developers. My goal is not to serve as a barrier between the business side and the technology side;… Continue reading Questions on the bridge
A big part of how I see my role as a Product Owner in an Agile environment is to bridge the gap between the business and the developers. On one side of the bridge is the Product Manager, whose primary goal is to hear and relay the voice of the market. Her job is to… Continue reading Product owners stand on a bridge
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 