Tag Archives: product owner

Every Great Product Owner Needs a Great Scrum Master

| March 26, 2014

The Scrum product owner and the Scrum Master are two separate roles that complement each other. To do a great job, product owners need a strong Scrum Master at their side. Unfortunately, I find that there is often a lack of Scrum Masters who can support the product owner. Sometimes there is confusion between the roles, or there is no Scrum Master at all. This post explains the differences between the two roles, what product owners should expect from their Scrum Master, and what the Scrum Masters are likely to expect from them.

Data Analysis Tips for Product Managers and Product Owners

| February 4, 2014

Data analysis might sound a bit nerdy, but it should be part of every product manager’s and product owner’s tool box. The idea is simple: Investigate the data gathered, learn form it, and use the new knowledge to create a successful product. In theory, that’s easy. But in practice, it can be challenging. The following tips help you get the most of your data analysis efforts.

The Picasso Product Owner: Balancing Users, Team, and Stakeholders

| September 23, 2013

Working as a product owner is fun and challenging at times. One challenge is to balance two separate concerns: the market with the users and their needs, and the company – the team developing the product as well as the internal stakeholders. If one aspect is neglected, the product success is in danger.

Combining Lean Startup and Scrum

| June 27, 2013

Can Lean Startup and Scrum be combined? And if so, how do they fit together? This post shares my answers for blending the two models, and it maps out a high-level process for product discovery and product development.

Product Owner Empowerment

| January 10, 2013

Playing the product owner role can be challenging: It requires the authority to say no to ideas, request, and feedback in order to achieve product success, as I explain in this article.

Working with the Product Vision Board

| October 11, 2012

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes,” says Morpheus to Neo in the movie “The Matrix”. This quote reminds me of the choice we face when dealing with a new product idea: Should we walk away from it, or should we implement it? To help you decide if and how to progress an idea, I have developed the Product Vision Board. In this post, I show how the board can be applied to kick-start the product discovery process and to create a new digital product.

The Scrum Cycle

| September 21, 2012

Scrum is a simple framework based on the idea of inspect and adapt: Create a product increment, show it to the stakeholders, and use the feedback to see if the right product is developed. This post describes what I regard as the essence of Scrum: a cyclic three-step process. It shows how the three steps help create a product with the right features and the right user experience (UX).

The Three Innovation Drivers

| August 23, 2012

Employing experiments is a powerful technique to facilitate the creation of new products and new features. But to experiment effectively, we need to be clear where innovation takes place and uncertainty resides. Is it the user experience, the business model, or the technologies? Without the right understanding, it’s difficult to ask leap-of-faith questions, formulate meaningful hypotheses, and carry out helpful experiments. This blog posts introduces a simple model that helps you effectively innovate.

The Product Canvas

| July 16, 2012

This post introduces my Product Canvas, a simple but powerful tool that helps you create a product with a great user experience and the right features. It combines agile development and user-experience design by complementing user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches and other UX artefacts. Read on to find out more.

Working with an Agile Product Roadmap

| May 14, 2012

This blog post discusses what an agile product roadmap is. It covers the information such a roadmap should contain, the benefits it provides, when it makes sense to employ a roadmap, how the product roadmap and the product backlog relate, and who should own the product roadmap.