Daniel,
If I've understood your question correctly...
I generally coach teams to take a couple of days before starting their first sprint to:
a) Get the sprint to start on the day of the week they initially want, and
b) Bulid up and groom the product backlog, and
c) Do a retrospective. You heard it -- a retro before you begin. I find it very valuable to record the results of that retro and then refer back that a few sprints later after some improvements have been made. Helps to see how far you've come.
As to how to get the PO ahead of your dev team, I recommend weekly, full Scrum Team backlog grooming. I have a series of articles on my web site that detail the ins and outs Backlog Grooming.
Good to start here:
http://www.scrumcrazy.com/What+does...ok+Like%3F