Deliver It Cast

  If you are a Product Owner working on a large product, then there likely multiples of you. Many PO’s working with various teams to achieve different goals along the same path.  How can you work better with each other and change the organization to focus on the problems your customers have? In this episode there’s a bit better dive than before on what different team setups look like and how Product Owners can work together and help frame the outcomes.  Along with a fantastic new book recommendation, this episode will hopefully inspire you to try something new.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Courtney Seiter - We’ve Changed Our Product Team Structure 4 Times: Here’s Where We Are Today Roman Pichler - Scaling the Product Owner Role Henrik Kniberg - Spotify Engineering Culture Deliver It Cast - EP34 Notes on Scaling Marty Cagan  - INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love – 2nd Edition C. Todd Lombardo - Roadmaps

  Does Product Ownership need fixing? Are some of the common agile and scrum practices screwed up? Jeff Patton thinks so and has a really compelling talk that’s he’s given about 5 things PO's need to do, and do better.  In this episode, Jeff joins the show to dive a bit deeper into where he sees those 5 things occurring, what we can do to correct them, and shares some insight as to where the issues arise from.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Jeff Patton - @jeffpatton - www.jpattonassociates.com How Agile Screwed Up Product Ownership and 5 Things You Can Do to Fix It by Jeff Patton Jeff Patton - 5 things you'll need to fix Agile product ownership Certified Scrum Product Owner Course Passionate Product Owner Joshua Kerievsky - Eliminating the Product Owner Role Paulo Andre - How HelloFresh reorganized its teams to scale twentyfold  

  A common pitfall that Product Owners need to be aware of is behaving with authority they don’t have.  A lot of people refer to this as PO’s and PM’s thinking they are the “CEO of the Product”. Bob Galen joins us on this episode to talk about some errors he sees in this approach and discuss from his recent post. We also discuss some ways in which Product Owners need to think and behave in a manner that is similar to that of a CEO.  Do we put it to rest? Let us know what you think.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Bob - Let’s eradicate bad product ownership, part-1,2 Martin Eriksson - Product Managers – You Are Not the CEO of Anything Marty Cagan - CEO of the Product Revisited Ale Carlos - Stop saying Product Management is like being the CEO of your own product Mind the Product - What we Learned at #mtpcon San Francisco 2018    

  Very rarely does a Product Owner get to work with a newly formed team. Getting started is a very important step so that the team understands what the goals, expectations, and vision of the product they will be creating. In this episode, you will hear some tips, strategies, and some audio clips of me doing just that while I visited our new team. If you have any PO tips for starting with a new team that were not covered, let us know.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Christiaan Verwijs - How to kickstart a great scrum team Kristy Francis -  5 simple tips on starting new scrum team Randy Silver - Gods, Superheroes, and Product Managers Marty Cagan - Revenge of the PMO  

  Hearing from fellow Product Owners is a good way to learn more about the role.  Having others share their experience and journey can give you ideas, insight, and practices to add to your situation. Last episode had a call to action and Paul Foster answered. In this episode he talks about this journey of getting started, learning, and growing as a PO for his company. Special thanks to Paul and to others who want to share their story with others around the world. If you have something you want to share or discuss, get in touch!   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Paul Foster - @paulmfoster Len Lagestee -  Even Happier Product Owners Mike Cottmeyer - Fast food and a better place to sleep

  Being comfortable with risk and uncertainty is a hallmark of a great Product Owner.  Understanding how to deal with unknowns or potential issues can help PO’s plan better, show value sooner, and reduce how nervous other people are.  Risk is a something that will travel with us as our products come to life. Keeping risks small, working through the known ones, and embracing the notion that customers using your product is a wonderful way to reduce many risks.       Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Sam McAfee - Product Management Is Easier When Your Team Can Actually Ship. Ekaterina Novoseltseva - Benefits of agile project management Agile for Humans - Exploring the 3 V’s of Product Ownership Rich Mironov - Four Laws Of Software Economics

  In order to communicate effectively, PO’s need to be excellent listeners. We must be able to understand and relate to what the person or group we are talking to are trying to tell us.  Sometimes, we might even agree with them. When we can actively listen and turn on all the listening skills, we really start to engage and grasp the problems that we are presented with. No matter if it’s with teams, customers, or one on one conversations, we all can work on becoming better listeners.      Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Geoff Watts - Empathic Listening in Scrum Glenn Llopis - 6 Ways Effective Listening Can Make You A Better Leader Chris Massey - Building Product in a Post-GDPR World Robert Mckee - Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting  

  One of the basic Product Owner skills is communication.  Delivering, receiving, and improving how and what we are communicating can make or break our efforts.  When there are issues ( and there usually are ), what are some ways to get back on track and increase the team and customer relationships? In a happy circumstance, John Cutler was thinking along the same lines and he joins the show to discuss ways that he has worked on repairing communication. We also talk about some other tips for PO’s to improve and get comfortable with their interactions.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju John Cutler @johncutlefish anchor.fm/john-cutler/ John Cutler - Huh? Maybe? Scott Ambler - Communication on Agile Software Teams Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High Itamar Gilad - The Tool that Will Help You Choose Better Product Ideas Mike Siemasz  - The Product Owner Is Dead, Long Live the Product Owner!  

  Product Owners think a lot about delivering value and how best to do that. One way that can help focus those efforts is a technique from Gojko Adzic called Impact Mapping.  On this episode, Gojko joins us to talk about the basic concepts, some tricks to asking better questions while putting one together, and ways to help facilitate better collaboration. It’s a very interesting area and skill for PO’s to learn and after listening, you should be able to start creating one yourself.           Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Gojko Adzic @gojkoadzic https://gojko.net/ Gojko Adzic - Impact Mapping with Innovation Games Gojko Adzic - Product Owner Key Skills – Impact Mapping, Story Mapping and Valuable User Stories Mark Schwartz - The Art of Business Value Ronny Kohavi - Online Experimentation at Microsoft Chris Williams - Why We Can't Stop Overcomplicating Agile  

  Product Owners should always work on trying to become better. Looking for areas to improve, selecting a few and then working on ways to make them successful is a good skill and practice to incorporate into your daily work.  In this episode, we talk about why continuous improvement is so much a core part of the agile mindset and what PO’s can do to work through changing for good.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Willem-Jan Ageling  - Modern Agile terms ambiguity — making a mountain out of a molehill? Dave Grey - Updated Empathy Map Canvas Lean Kit - Continuous Improvement Defined Hakan Forss - Toyota Kata - Habits for Continuous Improvements Melissa Perri - The Product Kata  

  At some point as a PO, will you “miss” an ask, you might even actually miss something important. It might be a small part of a larger story or even a detail of work that is happening now.  How can you make sure that miss is not critical to the success of the delivery? In this episode, some of the strategies for reducing the chances of it happening and better ways to communicate what a perceived miss looks like will be covered.        Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Scott Ambler - Agile Requirements Change Management Elena Yatzeck - How to Control Scope Creep in Agile Spine Model - AFH 090: Walking the Spine Model Product Craft - The State of Product Leadership  

  When your product gets really big and you need to work with teams at scale, what options do Product Owners have? In this episode, Dave West joins the show to discuss the Nexus framework and what PO’s need to know in order to work in this type of scaled environment. We cover some of the basics that are detailed in the new Nexus book and look at other keys to keeping multiple teams coordinated and delivering value together.     Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Dave West - @DavidJWest Scrum.org Dave West, Patricia Kong, Kurt Bittner -  The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum: Continuously Delivering an Integrated Product with Multiple Scrum Teams https://www.scrum.org/resources/scaling-scrum Freakonomics - Here’s Why All Your Projects Are Always Late — and What to Do About It Martin Fowler - Revised Agile Fluency Model

  One of the hardest parts of being a Product Owner is to find the required balance between so many seemingly competing directions and demands. However, it’s best seen not as a battle of opposing forces but a connectivity of interdependent aspects. Between teams and customers, technical and business, high and low levels. One should not dominate the other. Finding that balance is one key that I have found for success and on this episode, let us explore what some of those items that require balance actually are.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Marion Eickmann - Keep the Balance - The Product Owner Roman Pichler - The Picasso Product Owner: Balancing Users, Team, and Stakeholders Hope Gurion - Why I Can’t Be a Good Girl and Good Product Leader James Womack - Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation David Marquet - Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders Clarke Ching -

  Hearing how other people are successful in the PO role is a great way to learn new ideas.  We’ve been lucky to bring a few stories forward and happy that more are wanting to tell their story.  In this episode, we welcome Laurie Nelson who’s done many different roles including Product Owner and Product manager, to share her story and experience.  This is also the last episode for Season 3. Keep learning and sharing and we will be back after a break.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host Laurie Nelson - @laurielnelson - LinkedIn  

  The best resource for Product Owners is Bob Galen's Scrum Product Ownership book.  It’s a great reference and source of information for how to do the role the right way. Its intent is a guide for beginner PO’s and a resource for more seasoned ones as well.  In this episode, Bob joins the show to discuss the upcoming changes for the 3rd version.  In it, there are some new areas, more stories, and more information that PO’s need to understand.  A great deep dive into why some POs struggle and some strategies to help along the way.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host Bob Galen - @bobgalen - www.rgalen.com Bob Galen - Scrum Product Ownership - The 4 Quadrants of Product Ownership Modern Agile #13 - Issues with Product Owner role  

  Moving from dev to Product Owner with your team is something that is quite difficult to do.  There are a bunch of new skills, hats, and behaviors you have to be ready to learn.  In this episode, we talk with Jamie Collins who has been on that PO journey for the last year about his experience and what he has been able to do so far. If you want to share your PO story with us please contact the show, we love having other people talk about their successes, learnings, and how they do the role differently.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host Jamie Collins -  @jamieuka Darshana Sivakumar - How I transitioned from being a developer to a product manager at Amazon Uptal Vaishnav - Can the Principal Software Engineer Assume the Product Owner Role on a Scrum Team? John Culter - Fixing Quarterly Planning Dave Thomas - Agile is Dead  

  Where should Product Owners look to engage with others in Product Discovery? The notion of not “knowing” what should be done can be uncomfortable or straight scary to a lot of people. However, the notion of learning more about our product and how our users can, and are already benefiting from it is a great topic to explore. In this episode, David Hussman joins the show to talk about his riffs on how great product teams make meaningful impacts and explore ideas.     Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host David Hussman - http://devjam.com/   @davidhussman David Hussman - Products over Process David Hussman - Effective Product Discovery and Dude’s Law Henrik - Agile: Where are we at? Kevin Eikenberry - How to Respond to “We’ve Tried That Before”  

  Should Product Owners be concerned about flow? Is flow a part of what a PO needs to focus on from time to time? That thought, and the response to it, initiated a deeper look into what flow actually is and if it’s something that we need to learn more about.  There are several different aspects to flow and in this episode, we’ll dive into them and see if there are ways that we can at least help.     Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host Bob Marshall - 10 benefits of flow in software Johanna Rothman - Resource Efficiency vs. Flow Efficiency Marek Bowers - Creating Perfect User Flows for Smooth UX 3 Bottle Oiled Wheels Demonstration David Marquet - Creating Leadership and Engagement at Every Level Rian Van der Merwe  - The biggest mistakes product managers make (and how to avoid them)  

  The Product Owner role is established in the Scrum Guide. The behaviors, activities, and definitions of what a PO is supposed to do come mainly from this 16-page document.  It’s amazing then how so few people, including Product Owners, have actually read it. If you are “Doing Scrum” then you should at least understand what the guide says.  In this episode, Tim Ottinger joins us to talk about the mentions of the Product Owner, what that really means, and we discuss if most PO’s do those things. Once you understand what it says, then you can talk about if you and the teams are following scrum or notscrum.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host Tim Ottinger - http://agileotter.blogspot.com/   @tottinge Tim Ottinger - There is no such thing as a scrum development team.... Scrum.org - The Scrum Guide Agile for Humans - AFH 074: The Past, Present, and Future of Scrum IT Risk Manager - Fairness in processes and systems Steve Johnson -

  Something that Product Owners can continually get better at, is making the stories we tell, and ask for teams to work on, smaller. Smaller stories provide so many benefits to everyone and allow us to become more agile.  There are lots of different ways to approach this and in this episode, we’ll review some common ones that you can try on your own items.  Even if your first step is just to make sure something doesn’t last from day 1 to day 10 of a sprint, it’s an improvement.   Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - deliveritcast@gmail.com   Links: Co-host Post - Looking for a co-host Diana Larson & James Shore - The Agile Fluency Model Explained Cory Bryan - Priority Picking Principles Mike Cohn - Advice on How to Split Reporting User Stories Richard Lawson - Patterns for Splitting User Stories