Three Keys to Successful Product Ownership
by Arlen Bankston, 25 January 2012 | The Agile Blogosphere
This post is from LitheSpeed by Arlen Bankston. Click here to see the original post in full.
The Product Owner is both one of the most important roles in Scrum and often the most difficult to fill. In this post, I will explore a few aspects of successful product ownership that are often done poorly or not at all.Manage Both the Big Vision and the Small Batches
Keeping a balance between the development of product qualities that will fulfill the business case and the tactical execution of low-level features is perhaps the most important skill possessed by a Product Owner. The difficulty in simultaneously doing both of these things well often leads to an actual split in the role, where a “Strategic” or “Chief” Product Owner focuses on the big picture, and the “Tactical” or “Proxy” Product Owner works with individual teams attending to the details of execution. Tools like story mapping, product trees and personas are commonly applied at the big picture level by Strategic POs, while sketches, wireframes, process flows and various collaborative modeling techniques are generally employed by Tactical POs to help teams better understand and execute the details.
Strategic product ownership is focused on garnering feedback and testing the project's assumptions at the vision and business case level, while tactical product ownership should align the whole team against small batches of work within sprints to ensure the best execution possible at the detailed level.
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