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Resources for Product Owners

Maximizing Value for Your Customers, Users, and Organization as a Product Owner

Embarking on a journey as a Product Owner is a demanding and rewarding endeavor. As you step into this accountability, you'll find yourself balancing vision, value, and validation - a position that maximizes the value of the product by working collaboratively with the rest of the Scrum Team and an array of stakeholders.

Effective Product Owners are focused, decisive, humble, and clear communicators. They focus on the big picture and need to develop an array of skills to support them in their product decisions and in competent Product Ownership.  

These core tenets of the Product Owner Accountability are addressed in the following collection of learning series, blogs, articles and videos that contain practical ideas, tips, and activities with step-by-step guidelines that you can try immediately.

Bookmark or save and return to those resources often; you can find your saved resources in your Scrum.org profile under Saved Content.

 

Learning Series
A Product Owner is the member of the Scrum Team that is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. Learn more about what that means and a few of the common myths about Product Owners.

 

Learning Series
This learning series highlights 9 ways a Product Owner can boost their effectiveness.

 

 


 

Developing Product Ownership Competency

Product Ownership requires a distinct set of capabilities and skills. Product Ownership does not tie into any specific person, role, function or accountability but describes what needs to be done from a Product Ownership perspective when developing products. The Scrum framework describes a Product Owner as a set of accountabilities that a person fulfills. In which case, Product Ownership resides with the Product Owner. 

The Scrum framework describes a Product Owner as a set of accountabilities that a person fulfill. Successful Product Ownership requires a distinct set of capabilities and skills with a deep understanding of Agile Product Management.

Learning Series
Product Ownership requires a distinct set of capabilities and skills. These skills and capabilities are described here. Please note that we are describing Product Ownership here, meaning it does not tie into any specific person, role, function or accountability. This learning series illustrates what needs to be done from the Product Ownership perspective when developing products. The Scrum framework describes a Product Owner as a set of accountabilities that a person can take up. In which ca...

 

Podcast
Join host Dave West in a conversation with Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham as they chat about the challenges and strategies of Product Ownership. (30:34 Minutes)
5 from 2 ratings

 

 


 

Engage with Vision

Product development is a team sport. Teams perform when they do meaningful work, and when they are learning. The type of leadership exerted in Product Ownership plays a key role in unlocking the creative potential of teams and stakeholders through vision, clarity, and fostering a growth environment.

Learning Series
Business strategy is informed by the company’s mission and vision, and in turn informs individual product visions. An organization inspects and adapts its business strategy based on feedback gathered from delivering product Increments.
Module
A product is a vehicle for delivering value, meaning valuable outcomes, to customers.Outcomes are experiences that help the customer to achieve, or at least make progress toward, a goal that they value.The word "product" encompasses a broad range of solutions that organizations can use to deliver va...
4.6 from 25 ratings
Learning Series
A product roadmap is a visual aid technique that a Scrum Team can use to share and discuss what is upcoming for the product at a high-level.

 

Learning Series
By understanding its customers and users, a Scrum Team can identify opportunities, be more innovative and create products that people need and use. Here are different techniques ways to do this.
Module
This pieces describes the relationship between business strategy, goals, Evidence-Based Management, and experimentation.
4.8 from 4 ratings
Module
Customer outcomes are the results that customers and users experience when they use a product. This piece describes the characteristics of customer outcomes as well as how to define them.
5 from 3 ratings

 

 


 

Lead to Value

Contextual awareness is crucial in a complex environment. Thriving in it means both understanding your context, aligning with it, influencing it and being able to operate in it. Leading to value is both about discovering unrealized value, and influencing your context to be able to create value.

Product development is essentially about the decisions you make. To increase the rate of innovation and learning, speed of decision making is a strongly limiting factor. With too little context (such as unclear vision & direction, slow and poor access to customers/users, collaboration with other teams or contributors) decision making suffers.

Learning Series
Scrum encourages frequent collaboration with stakeholders, and customers in particular. Understanding how to identify and learn about the challenges that key stakeholders face will help the Scrum Team better deliver the value they are seeking.
Learning Series
The objective of a Scrum Team is to deliver value to customers and stakeholders. Product Value actively drives customer satisfaction, loyalty, brand reputation, and the longevity of a business by providing customers with benefits that satisfy their needs.
Learning Series
Understanding a product’s revenue and cost is key to creating and executing on a product’s strategy as well as determining its value.

 

Learning Series
This learning series discusses the importance of developing and delivering valuable product Increments in order to improve the outcomes that its users and customers experience. Scrum Teams deliver product Increments and measure the results to understand what customers want or need.
Learning Series
Scrum Teams deliver value to customers in product Increments. Product stability is vital as each Increment builds on the last.
Learning Series
Knowing your competition and the dynamics of your competitive landscape are essential to help your organization thrive. This content includes different models to understand the competitive landscape and tips on how to act on that information to build a competitive advantage. This information is vital for effective product management.

 

Module
Scrum Teams are accountable for delivering valuable products that meet their customers' needs. How a product is marketed, priced and positioned is intrinsically linked to the overall customer experience as well as an organization’s product and market strategy. Aligning on pricing strategy is an asp...
5 from 4 ratings
Module
What is Market Share?Market share is the portion of a market controlled by a particular company or product.* It is calculated by dividing the company's total sales or revenue by the industry’s total sales or revenue over a specific period of time. Sometimes, market share is calculated by dividing t...
5 from 1 rating
Learning Series
Hypothesis-driven development offers a structured approach to problem-solving and innovation while minimizing risks, enabling evidence-based decisions, and fostering experimentation. This series includes the benefits of a hypothesis-drive approach for Scrum Teams and product delivery as well as templates and examples of different hypothesis formats.

 


 

Evolve with Validation

Product Ownership doesn't use data to judge, but makes quantitative and qualitative data a powerful ally in making decisions on what bets to make. Discovery and validation is used to iteratively find out what is needed, wanted, what works and doesn't work.

Learning Series
Product Backlog Management is the act of adjusting and ordering items on the Product Backlog so that the Scrum Team can deliver the most valuable product possible. This learning series explores Product Backlog Management.
Learning Series
Scrum Team can use forecasting and release planning as a guide for delivering a product through small incremental and frequent releases rather than big bang product launches.
Module
This pieces describes the stages of the product lifecycle and how a Product Owner should consider adjust their product strategy accordingly.
4.5 from 2 ratings

 

Learning Series
Product metrics help assess the customer and business value a product delivers. They provide insights from the perspective of users and the market.
Activity
This activity is designed to help you understand how value is currently measured for your product. It’s also a good activity to improve your current approach to measuring value. It can be facilitated as a workshop for Scrum Teams working on a product or product portfolio together and may include int...
5 from 2 ratings
Module
Scrum Teams use feedback as a compass to improve and innovate their product. Here are 5 strategies to help teams gather better feedback.
5 from 1 rating

 

Video
This video highlights the importance of integrating product discovery and validation into Scrum to test assumptions and gather valuable customer feedback. (3:35 Minutes)
4.6 from 9 ratings

 

 

Recommended Training for Product Owners

Explore and learn to apply the accountabilities of the Product Owner and the principles of Professional Scrum. Gain an understanding of the pivotal role the Product Owner plays in bridging strategy and agile product management in order to help the Scrum Team create valuable products.

Dive deeper into the accountabilities of the Product Owner and agile product management. This course focuses on helping experienced Product Owners expand their ability to establish a vision, validate their hypotheses and ultimately deliver more value through gaining  entrepreneurial product leadership skills and practices.

 

 

Students learn techniques and methods to effectively manage a Product Backlog that clearly expresses the future vision of the product and brings transparency to what is most valuable for the Scrum Team to work on to delight stakeholders and customers.

Executives, managers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, coaches and consultants experience how to guide teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities and business results. Learn how to apply the EBM framework to set clear goals and measures.

 

 

All Recommended Courses for Product Owners