There’s a widespread belief that the Product Owner handles writing user stories (partly true), and helps the team clarify requirements.
That’s not right! At least, not the whole truth, not even the most important tasks for PO’s.
There’s a much more important aspect of the PO role, that has nothing to do with User Stories, Scrum, Kanban or demos.
The Product Owner role as originally described
When the PO role came to be (in Scrum), it was about “owning” the success of the product. Not the content; not helping the team (that’s why we have Scrum Masters!); not backlogs; not reports; not roadmaps. But PRODUCT SUCCESS!
There are lots of tools out there that help us focus on product success. But none of them will be helpful if we have the wrong mindset, and focus on the wrong tasks.
The Product Owner Success Toolkit
In the PO Success Toolkit workshop I discuss the following:
- How to find what is “value” in your product’s domain
- How to zero-in on the most important experiments that help us deliver that value
- Methods to define and execute quick experiments. And ultimately, learn from those (don’t forget, you must know when you are wrong)
- How to work with the team, so that the User Stories are easy to understand and even created/managed by the team. Don’t forget that the team needs the Backlog, not the Product Owner!
The next PO Success Toolkit workshop will take place at Hypoport, Berlin on March 20th, following the #NoEstimates workshop which takes place the day before (March 19th).
