The Professional Product Owner’s Guide to Maximizing Value with Scrum

“This book presents a method of communicating our desires, cogently, coherently, and with a minimum of fuss and bother.”

The role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it’s about much more than mechanics: it’s about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You’ll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximize it throughout your entire product lifecycle.

Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework.

• Define success from the “outside in,” using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximize value
• Bring empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner’s role, and align everyone behind a shared business model
• Use Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce risk
• Effectively apply Scrum’s Product Owner role, artifacts, and events
• Populate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specifications
• Plan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debt
• Scale your product, not your Scrum
• Use Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team’s work

Improve your understanding of Scrum through the proven experience and collected wisdom of experts around the world. Based on real-life experiences, the 97 essays in this unique book provide a wealth of knowledge and expertise from established practitioners who have dealt with specific problems and challenges with Scrum.

You’ll find out more about the rules and roles of this framework, as well as tactics, strategies, specific patterns to use with Scrum, and stories from the trenches. You’ll also gain insights on how to apply, tune, and tweak Scrum for your work. This guide is an ideal resource for people new to Scrum and those who want to assess and improve their understanding of this framework.

• "Scrum Is Simple. Just Use It As Is.," Ken Schwaber
• "The 'Standing Meeting,'" Bob Warfield
• “Specialization Is for Insects,” James O. Coplien
• "Scrum Events Are Rituals to Ensure Good Harvest," Jasper Lamers
• “Servant Leadership Starts from Within,” Bob Galen
• "Agile Is More than Sprinting," James W. Grenning