A Working List of Resources for Product Owners

There are so many great resources related to being a great Product Owner. 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 career absorbing from below…

Here’s a nice “nutshell” on Agile Product Ownership from Dandy People:

Front Row Agile / Mt. Goat Product Owner

• 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 I’ve 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 being an effective Product Owner

• Being an Effective Product Owner

Roman Pichler – Product Ownership

• Read all of Roman Pichler’s 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

• 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 — 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

“Find out how great products are built”

Love the approach to exploring four types of risk:

1. value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
2. usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
3. feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have)
4. business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)

More Resources for 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

Books

• 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

Podcasts

Amplitude’s List of Best Product Manager Podcasts for 2019: Design, Marketing, Analytics and More.

• (Agile Uprising made the list 🙂 )

Keep the List Going…

I’ve missed more than a few.. add your suggestions via comments…