Practical Product Management for Product Owners

Hone Agile Product Owner Behaviors that Lead to Marketplace Winners

Organizations pour vast resources into building new products and services. Yet too many are poorly conceived, don’t delight (or even satisfy) customers, and fail in the marketplace. The solution is more effective agile product ownership and product management. This book is an expert guide to the behaviors, stances, and practices of world-class agile product development, reflecting deep in-the-trenches experience from world-renowned experts.

Chris Lukassen and Robbin Schuurman introduce powerful tools, ideas, and skills for delivering superior products and services, and for avoiding pitfalls that keep you from seeing what customers really need and want. Learn through a start-to-finish, Scrum-based case study, drawing on concepts the authors created for their breakthrough Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced (PSPO-A) training course. This innovative approach has already helped thousands of product owners excel–and it can transform the way you create products.

• Replace negative product owner behaviors with approaches that lead to excellence
• Represent customers more empathetically and effectively
• Connect customers, values, and features more coherently
• Tell better stories, set clearer goals, and create more valuable roadmaps
• Innovate business models, run better experiments, and scale products more successfully
• Make more successful decisions, involve the right people, and rely on better data
• Become a great agile collaborator, across governance, budgeting, contracting, and beyond
• Influence customers, users, stakeholders, and teams to improve your overall effectiveness
• Optimize every organizational role related to product ownership

Product owners, managers, and team leads will find this guide indispensable along with Agile/Scrum coaches, consultants, and executives wanting to generate more value from product management across the organization.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Stances of the Product Owner

Part I: Summary: The Stances of the Product Owner

Part II: The Customer Representative

Part II: Summary: The Customer Representative

Part III: The Visionary

Part III: Summary: The Visionary

Part IV: The Experimenter

Part IV: Summary: The Experimenter

Part V: The Decision Maker

Part V: Summary: The Decision Maker

Part VI: The Collaborator

Part VI: Summary: The Collaborator

Part VII: The Influencer

Part VII: Summary: The Influencer

About the Author

Chris Lukassen has been active in product management for 20+ years, and co-created Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Product Owner – Advanced course. He currently trains product managers in Scrum, leadership, user experience, and metrics. Robbin Schuurman is a product leader, consultant, Professional Scrum Trainer, and leader of Xebia’s Product Management Academy. He supports organizations in digital, agile, and product transformations; and helps product owners grow customer impact, improve agility, and shorten time-to-learn. Lukassen and Schuurman co-founded The Value Maximizers.