The Art of Agile Product Ownership: A Guide for Product Managers, Business Analysts, and Entrepreneurs

Product Information

The PO’s responsibilities can generally be categorized into five primary areas, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Product Owner areas of responsibility As a member of the extended Product Management function, the PO is the team’s primary customer advocate and primary link to business and technology strategy. This enables the team to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders while continuously evolving the Solution. Details Agile Product Delivery is one of the seven core competencies of SAFe, which is essential to achieving Business Agility. The Measure and Grow article provides a self-assessment for each competency, including APD, to evaluate a team’s proficiency and identify improvement opportunities. Why Agile Product Delivery? Focus on the customer – Employ user and market research, including developing personas, to align and focus the organization on specific, targeted user segments. Stream-aligned team – organized around the flow of work and has the ability to deliver value directly to the customer or end user.

High-performing organizations use DevOps to dramatically outperform competitors by delivering and supporting their products and services to respond to customer demands faster. The cookie is set by rlcdn.com. The cookie is used to serve relevant ads to the visitor as well as limit the time the visitor sees an and also measure the effectiveness of the campaign. Build whole product solutions – Design whole product solutions for the user’s needs, ensuring that the initial and long-term user experiences are optimal and evolve as needed. The third part then follows this with a deeper investigation of how product ownership relates to product management and business analyst roles.Building the right solutions requires deep knowledge of business strategy, customer segmentation, market dynamics, and value stream economics. The PO establishes a close relationship with Product Management to derive these macro-level insights and apply them to specific product domains. Building solutions the right way requires Team and Technical Agility, DevOps practices, and a Continuous Delivery Pipeline. These technical capabilities determine the speed and quality with which value can be delivered, and the PO relies on the Agile team to provide them. Agile Teams – Agile Teams embrace the ‘Agile Manifesto’ and SAFe Core Values and Principles. They apply Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, and other Built-In Quality practices. This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located. Leffingwell, Dean. Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise. Addison-Wesley, 2011. Achieving business agility requires Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to increase their ability to deliver innovative products and services rapidly. This capability requires balancing the focus on execution and customers, ensuring the creation of the right solutions, for the right customers, at the right time.

After reading about the scope of the product owner role in the first part of the book, I had questions about the roles feasibility. To simplify this job of team design, SAFe applies four fundamental team topologies [1] which are defined as follows: ARTs include the teams that define, build, and test features, as well as those that deploy, release, and operate the solution. Individual teams have a choice of Agile practices, based primarily on Scrum, XP, and Kanban. Each Agile team has 5 – 11 dedicated individual contributors, covering all the roles necessary to build a quality increment of value every iteration. Teams may be technology-focused—delivering software, hardware, and any combination—or business-focused. Each Agile team has two specialty roles, the Scrum Master and the Product Owner. And of course, Agile teams within the ART are themselves cross-functional, as shown in Figure 4. Figure 4. Agile teams are cross-functional Ultimately, DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices that provides solution elements to the customer without handoffs or too much external production and operations support. As illustrated in Figure 7, SAFe’s approach to DevOps is grounded in five concepts: Culture, Automation, Lean Flow, Measurement, and Recovery ( CALMR), briefly described below. Figure 7. SAFe’s CALMR approach to DevOps

Business Hours

Accept Stories – The PO works with the team to agree on accepted story completion. This includes validating that the story meets acceptance criteria, that it has the appropriate, persistent acceptance tests, and that it otherwise complies with its Definition of Done (DoD). In so doing, the PO assures that quality is built in. Understand market forces – Market rhythms, market events, sudden opportunities, competitive threats, and changing regulations significantly influence product strategy. POs regularly engage with Product Management to analyze market research and understand the business drivers that trigger Feature requests. The schedule is fixed – The train departs the station on a known, reliable schedule, as determined by the chosen Program Increment (PI) cadence. If a Feature misses a timed departure and does not get planned into the current PI, it can catch the next one.

For most enterprises moving to Agile, this is a new–and typically full-time–role for each Agile Team. Each PO represents the needs of customers and the business within a particular Solution domain, typically co-represented by a Product Manager. Together, they ensure that product strategy and implementation remain connected throughout the value stream. Enabling team – organized to assist other teams with specialized capabilities and help them become proficient in new technologies. Every product owner faces a complex and unique set of challenges within their team. This provides each individual the opportunity to fill the role with different ambitions, skills, and insights. Your product ownership journey can take a variety of paths, and The Art of Agile Product Ownership is here to be your guide.Author Allan Kelly, who delivers Agile training courses to major companies, pulls from his experience to help you discover what it takes to be a successful product owner. You will learn how you need to define your role within a team and how you can best incorporate ownership with strategy. With the Agile method, time is the key factor, and after using the lessons from this book you will confidently be able to synthesize features, functionality, and scope against delivery. You will find out how other team members such as the UX designer and business analyst can support and enhance your role as product owner, and how every type of company structure can adapt for optimal agility. Used to store information about the time a sync with the lms_analytics cookie took place for users in the Designated Countries Enable operations– Product Management provides support and enablement to key functions in the operational value stream to ensure the full value of every release is realized. Marketing, sales, customer success, compliance, and channel partners, for example, receive assistance in preparing customers, stakeholders, and operations teams for product launches.Agile Team events – PIs are divided into iterations, which help align Agile Teams and enable faster response to change. Team cadence-based events further support teams: Iteration Planning, Team Syncs (usually held daily), Iteration Review, and Iteration Retrospective.

Businesses need to balance their execution focus with a customer focus to help ensure that they are creating the right solutions, for the right customers, at the right time. APD is grounded in customer-centricity, design thinking, and Lean UX putting the customer at the center of every decision. It applies design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable. Complicated subsystem team – organized around specific subsystems that require deep specialty skills and expertise. Product Management is responsible for coordinating and bringing new solutions to market while ensuring the ongoing success of existing products. Design ThinkingApply market segmentation – Not all users are the same. They have different challenges, desire different features, and value products differently at different times. Product Management divides the user population into segments based on common characteristics and defines solutions for the most appealing segments. Instead, the ART applies cadence and synchronization to assure that the system is iterating as a whole (Figure 8). Figure 8. Aligned development: this system is iterating In a flow-based system, establishing routine development activities on a fast, synchronized PI cadence—a regular predictive rhythm of team and ART events—is a proven strategy to manage the inherent variability in product development. The following activities support this cadence: Malviya, Kartik. Lean UX versus Design Thinking. Medium, November 11, 2020. Retrieved October 11, 2023, from https://uxplanet.org/lean-ux-versus-design-thinking-3f9ebb8aef59 Every Product Owner needs to consider where they lie on this spectrum from internal to external, from BA to Product Manager