Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

I've been a product owner working on agile projects for several years now, mainly using the Scrum approach.  However, it's only recently I found myself in a position where I needed to recruit additional product owners to work on a larger development project. This obviously got me thinking, as I hovered my pen over a blank sheet of A4, about what makes a great Scrum product owner and what I should write in my job ad. The agile approach to product and software development is still a relatively fresh approach.  It's only really been around for a handful of years, and has only come into its own in the last five or six years.  So ready made product owners are few and far between.  Product managers or project managers are entirely different roles for a different, less agile, approach.  That said many product and project managers have the potential to transition, if they're flexible in their approach and willing to re-learn the agile way...

Unless you've been asleep all weekend you will have seen the news about the latest cyber-attack - possibly one of the biggest and high profile attacks yet. Well here's the bad news (if that wasn't bad enough)... We need to get used to them as they're going to happen more frequently.   With so much data being stored in the cloud and practically everyone using the Internet, cyber-crime is only going to get more prevalent. So how do you protect yourself and your business? There are some high tech solutions out there, some of them using lots of expensive kit and software.  By all means ensure you get up to speed on what potential risks you face and what's out there to protect you, but don't forget the basic premise of keeping safe online. Check your passwords and ensure they're as water tight as you can make them. The easiest way for you to become a victim of cyber-crime is for your password to be captured and used to access your systems and data.  There...

"What's an Epic?" I hear you ask. It's certainly something I asked when I first began using the excellent Yodiz Agile Management tool where all of a sudden "Assign to an Epic" was an option in a drop down list in the Add User Story in the Backlog screen. Epics certainly didn't make any appearance when I did my certified Scrum product owner course, and I lasted almost eighteen months as a product owner on Scrum based Agile software development projects before the word even came into my consciousness.  Some of them were even successful projects! Like everyone who doesn't know what something is these days, I Googled it.  Strangely the usually trusty search engine didn't return an overwhelming volume of results and clicking on a few of the top links seemed to suggest an Epic was a User Story gleaned from a client's idea.  That didn't sound right to me.   Don't most user stories emanate from a client's idea at some point (unless...

For over seven years I've been working as a Product Owner in software development companies that use offshore development teams.   For the last three years we've adopted Agile methodologies, in particular Scrum. As you can imagine, using a highly collaborative approach such as Scrum has its challenges when your development teams don't share a country never mind an office, have different time zones, languages, customs and so on.  When I first started looking into Scrum I found the internet strangely sparse of advice and experiences of using Scrum in the offshore scenario so I decided to jot down a few learning points. 1. Use the Right Collaboration Tools Collaboration is key.  Geographically dispersed teams working in different timezones will need to get together virtually on a regular basis, and also have the ability to start ad hoc meetings or conversations. We have found that Yodiz (www.yodiz.com) to be a good tool for managing the various Scrum artefacts inc...