There are so many great resources to support Product Owners. Below are but a few of my favorites.
If you only have 10 minutes and want to understand what it means to be a great Product Owner…
Watch Henrik Kniberg’s 15-minute video at 1.25x speed!
Then spend the rest of your Agile Product Owner career absorbing from below…
Here’s a nice “nutshell” on Agile Product Ownership from Dandy People:
Front Row Agile / Mt. Goat Product Owners and Scrum
- The Role of a Product Owner: Responsibilities & Characteristics
- The Role of a Product Owner (Part 2): Life in the Fast Lane
- The Role of a Product Owner (Part 3): Anti-Patterns
- Mt. Goat Online Training for Product Owners
- Ultimate Product Owner: Optimising Product Delivery
- Better User Stories
- Write Better User Stories in Less Time With Less Aggravation
BDD (Behavior Driven Development)
- Behavior-Driven Development for Product Owners
- Read Specification by Example – “the closest Iâve seen to a ‘BDD book’ (as a treatment of methodology)” says Dan North
HDD (Hypothesis Driven Design)
- https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/09/understanding-design-thinking-lean-agile-work-together/
- https://youtu.be/6GJs011eeKA
- https://youtu.be/By5OfgWVBG8
- https://youtu.be/18JCZ7Us1HQ
- https://medium.theuxblog.com/hypotheses-driven-ux-design-c75fbf3ce7cc
Scrum Alliance on Effective Product Owners
Roman Pichler – Product Ownership in Agile
- Read all of Roman Pichlerâs stuff
- Take at least two of his courses
- http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/books/strategize/
- http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/the-product-owner-responsibilities/
Stefan Wolpers on Scrum Product OwnersÂ
- 28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
- If you like to learn by learning what NOT to do, check out Stefan’s “How to Sabotage A Product Owner â 53 Anti-Patterns from the Trenches” which includes such gems as
- Insist on all projects being accomplished within a fixed time, scope, and budget setting.
- Use the Daily Scrum to check on progress and hold the Product Owner accountable for not meeting your targets.
- Enforce proprietary and obscure metrics useless to the Scrum team.
Marty Cagan – SVPG Silicon Valley Product Group
There’s a fantastic discussion on the “Product Management Theater” with Marty Cagan, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky .
Marty, who has worked with more product teams than anyone else on the planet, shared invaluable insights that are especially relevant in today’s rapidly evolving market.
- The Overhiring Phenomenon: Marty discusses the trend of overhiring during the pandemic and the proliferation of roles that may not deliver proportional value.
- Product Management Theater: Explore the concept of ‘Product Management Theater’ where roles that sound integral are often not aligned with the core objectives of true product management.
- The Role of Product Managers: Marty emphasizes the distinction between project managers and product managers, underscoring the strategic importance of the latter in delivering real business outcomes.
- Empowerment in Product Teams: Learn about the shift from feature teams to empowered product teams that focus on outcomes rather than output.
- Marty’s New Book – “Transformed” – addresses how companies can shift towards a more empowered and effective product management model.
Browse the Silicon Valley Product Group’s website and “Find out how great products are built”
e.g., the approach to exploring four types of risk:Â
- value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
- usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
- feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have)
- business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)
More Resources for Agile and Scrum Product Owners
- https://hackernoon.com/product-owner-anti-patterns-22ed1f989867
- R Galen
- A podcast with a guy named Cory…..(http://www.deliveritcast.com)
- Scrum Product Ownership: Balancing Value from the Inside Out
- http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/product-managers-for-the-digital-world
- 10 Must Read Books for Product Owners
- Why Spotify Squads Are a Popular Failure for Product Teams
Podcasts for Product Owners
Amplitude’s List of Best Product Manager Podcasts for 2019: Design, Marketing, Analytics and More.
Books for Product Owners and Product Managers
- Emma Butler has a nice post “Best Product Management Books 2019 For Newbies to Seasoned Vets & From Roadmapping to Design”
- David Pereira published The 10 books that transformed my mindset as a Product Owner
Thanks for mentioning my Product Ownership book Andy. I appreciate it.
As an FYI, folks can join my mailing list at http://www.rgalen.com and get access to a free PDF copy of the book. They can also get access to a Product Ownership maturity assessment tool I developed as well.
Keep up the great work!
Bob Galen
https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Product-Ownership-Balancing-Inside/dp/0988502623/
Dear Andy , thanks for sharing this great resource list, i will searhing my reserch paper some documents so i came across to your blog, HDD materials is great to share.
Thank you again.
Have a nice days.
Thank you Andy for sharing our Product ownership poster, and what great company with all that goodness đ We have also recently published a digital training and toolbox to support Agile product management that might be worth checking out.
https://www.agileonlinetrainings.com/agile-product-development-process-organization-training
Have a great weekend đđźââď¸