Agile Product Owner Quotes

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality.

Project leaders need to focus on value in several ways: value determination (with product owners), value prioritization (backlog management), and value creation (iterative development).

product owners felt more confident, more able to influence, more visible, better organized, and better motivated in the new role

The product owner must have enough authority and the right level of management sponsorship

Product owners should spend at least one hour per day with their teams in the team room.

The ScrumMaster supports the product owner and team, protects the team and the process,

One individual should never be both ScrumMaster and product owner.

The Product Owner is the one and only person responsible for managing the Product Backlog

The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision.

As an entrepreneur, the product owner facilitates creativity;

The Product Owner plans, composes, distributes, and tracks work from his or her level down....

Scrum allocates up to 10% of the team’s capacity in every sprint for supporting the product owner

Most sprint planning meetings I have attended were fun. The ones that weren’t involved a poorly groomed product backlog. When the backlog isn’t groomed prior to the meeting, the product owner and team often try to carry out impromptu grooming activities, which consume valuable planning time and result in poor requirements and weak commitments. Plus, everyone is exhausted by the end of the meeting.

Eliciting the user stories is a dynamic collaborative endeavor which supports the concept of value. Essentially, just gathering requirements will populate the backlog with unnecessary user stories that do not contribute value.

Winners throw out the traditional product management and introduction processes they learned at existing companies. Instead, they combine agile engineering and Customer Development to iteratively build, test and search for a business model, turning unknowns into knowns. Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof.” They relentlessly test for insights, and they course-correct in days or weeks, not months or years, to preserve cash and eliminate time wasted on building features and products that customers don’t want.

One way that the product owner maximizes ROI is by directing the team toward the most valuable work, and away from less valuable work. That is, the product owner controls the order, sometimes called priority, of items in the team’s backlog. In scrum, no-one but the product owner is authorized to ask the team to do work or to change the order of backlog items.

Another way that the product owner maximizes the value realized from the team’s efforts is to make sure the team fully understands the requirements. If the team fully understands the requirements,

David Varonin is a digital business analyst with expertise in a wide array of platforms, including, but not limited to: Agile, Agile Craft, Azure DevOps, Jira, SAFe, and IBM 4690.

David Varonin, a Certified Scrum Product Owner, thrives on fostering cultures of creativity and innovation. With a knack for problem-solving, he guides development teams in Agile practices, ensuring projects stay on track.

less. All the work to create value happens within a sprint.

DevOps benefits all of us in the technology value stream, whether we are Dev, Ops, QA, Infosec, Product Owners, or customers. It brings joy back to developing great products, with fewer death marches. It enables humane work conditions with fewer weekends worked and fewer missed holidays with our loved ones. It enables teams to work together to survive, learn, thrive, delight our customers, and help our organization succeed.

The product owner is responsible for recording the requirements, often in the form of user stories

The deal [between product owners and] engineering goes like this: Product management takes 20% of the team’s capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. They might use it to rewrite, re-architect, or re-factor problematic parts of the code base...whatever they believe is necessary to avoid ever having to come to the team and say, ‘we need to stop and rewrite [all our code].’ If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. However, I get nervous when I find teams that think they can get away with much less than 20%.

In other words, when we conflate deployment and release, it makes it difficult to create accountability for successful outcomes—decoupling these two activities allows us to empower Development and Operations to be responsible for the success of fast and frequent deployments, while enabling product owners to be responsible for the successful business outcomes of the release (i.e., was building and launching the feature worth our time).

The deal [between product owners and] engineering goes like this: Product management takes 20% of the team’s capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. They might use it to rewrite, re-architect, or re-factor problematic parts of the code base...whatever they believe is necessary to avoid ever having to come to the team and say, ‘we need to stop and rewrite [all our code].’ If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. However, I get nervous when I find teams

Rule No. 2: Pair Customer Development with Agile Development Customer Development is useless unless the product development organization can iterate the product with speed and agility.

As the agile coach, make sure the product owner knows how to prioritize the backlog and when to have it done. Offer to coach him through the thinking needed to prioritize it, but if he declines your offer and shows up to sprint planning with the backlog unprepared, then let the consequences be what they will be. In other words, let the product owner fail.

The following are the principles and practices that team members need to understand in preparation for their first Sprint: They are committing to Sprint goals as a team, not as individuals committing to their own tasks. The entire team will succeed or fail on this basis. Overcommitting is not a great danger, because they can renegotiate with the Product Owner during the Sprint. Teams new to Scrum are more likely to underestimate their work. Commitment is reciprocal. Management will not change their goals or the Sprint review date without a Sprint reset. The Definition of Done must be clearly understood between the team and the Product Owner. The functionality delivered at the end of the Sprint must reflect this definition. The rules of the Daily Scrum are understood. The purpose and utility of the burndown chart are understood.

Scrum recognizes only three distinct roles: product owner, scrum master, and team member

The mix of Customer Development and Agile engineering dramatically increases the odds of new product and company success, while reducing the need for upfront cash and eliminating wasted time, energy, money and effort.

Another way that the product owner maximizes the value realized from the team’s efforts is to make sure the team fully understands the requirements. If the team fully understands the requirements, then they will build the right thing, and not waste time building the wrong thing.