Here are the main practices of the Product Owner:
- Integrating into the development team
- Being available to the team, colocating with the team as much as possible. Ideally, there is one team or at most two teams per Product Owner.
- Driving the team at a sustainable pace,
- Understand and help to allocate capacity for enabling work
- Writing stories to represent the requirements and the pace
- Explaining the stories to the team with “just in time” elaboration
- Walking the floor and look for issues / delays / improvement opportunities
- Serving as liaison with the Business and Business SMEs
- Participating in or observing team meetings
- Helping the team to resolve or escalate impediments as appropriate, providing the Team Agility Coach with status of impediments reported by the team
- Protecting the team from distractions and outside influences, including loaner requests, multiple projects, and production support (where possible)
- Integrating the team into the broader value stream (or program)
- Acting as the designated communicator for the team to the value stream (or program) level, discussing with the Product Manager:
- Team-level prioritization decisions
- The implications of implementing the desired value (e.g., team technical challenges)
- Non-architectural implementation issues
- Assessing the Business value of the team objectives.
- Attending planning events and the Product Demonstration and Review events.
- Managing the team backlog
- Populating the backlog.
- Decompose features in the Program Backlog into User Stories that go into the team backlog. Each User Story should be sized to be done in one iteration; preferably in 2-3 days.
- Prioritizing the backlog.
- Work with the team to apply a prioritization method such as Weighted Shortest Job First to put the backlog items into order of priority.
- Assist team in developing estimates for the relative effort expected to be required to implement features and stories
- Observe the team as it picks stories from the team backlog and adds them to a “commitment list” for the iteration.
- Observe the team as it chooses additional “stretch objective” stories that they will try to finish in the iteration.
- Maintaining and modifying the backlog.
- Refine the product backlog to maximize ROI
- Add new items or modify existing items based on feedback from stakeholders and learning by the team.
- Understand and establish capacity for enabler work
- Getting ready for the next iteration
- Monitoring iteration execution
- Understanding and help setup visual controls.
- Reviewing information visibility charts.
- Reading the information visibility boards for signs of problems with the iteration for signs of failing agility.
- Remaining aware of whether the team’s other responsibilities (changes, internal projects, unplanned work) are reducing their ability to complete the committed backlog items.
- Note: Using a burn-up chart is recommended, because it shows changes in the team’s capacity (the top, “target” line on the chart) along with completed work.
- Assessing and accepting product
- Understanding the priorities of the Product Manager
- Specifying acceptance criteria for each story in backlog
- Accepting or rejecting backlog items at the Product Demonstration and Review at the end of the iteration
- Deciding with team about Carry-Over Work
- Working with Release Management
- Working with Release Management to release as appropriate
- Writing stories required for release
