INTRODUCTION

This book describes how to effectively manage man-made products, mostly software products. But it just as easily could address other man-made products such as electrical grids, nuclear power plants, apple orchards, nano-robots, even storm-drainage systems. Anything envisioned, created, sustained, and eventually retired or replaced by people is within our purview.

We specifically address complex products, where more is unknown about their context than is known. The product’s creator—its Product Owner—perceives a space of ideas and conceives something that others might find valuable or useful.

Take as an example the first version of iOS developed for the iPhone. As this product was being conceived and created, more was unknown than known, and a certain degree of success and failure was involved. The Product Owner brought the vision to a small group of people who had expertise in the necessary technology, market, and products. This group employed empiricism and small self-organizing teams to manage the creation and development of iOS, to control the risk, and to create value.

Sometimes an idea isn’t ready for prime time. The technology might not be adequate for the vision, or the people may not be adequately skilled. However, the risk is controlled through short cycles of experimentation.

This process is called Scrum,¹ a framework for creating and then further developing complex products. Scrum identifies the Product Owner as the person who brings the product to life, from vision to creation, and who remains responsible for the product’s viability as it develops and continues through its life cycle. A Product Owner is the one person who is accountable for a product at any point in time.

A product does things, performs functions, or causes change or results. A product’s life cycle includes the following components:

Creation—A product is envisioned and parts of it come to life, so it has some of the capabilities and can perform some of the functions that have been envisioned for it.

Emergence—As the product is used and time passes, new capabilities and functions appear. These may be created for it or may be appended to it by interfaces to other products.

Maturity—The product reaches maturity when fully capable, as envisioned and as emerged, as shaped by marketplace forces, new technologies, and the capabilities of its Product Owners.

Senescence—Over the hill, the product is still used but has been eclipsed by newer, easier, more appealing products that have more or fewer capabilities, at greater or lesser prices, but are preferred by the marketplace and are more valuable.

A product could be a computer, software the computer is operating, a security system, a camera, a car, a workflow system, just-in-time-inventory software, a rocket, or a business function that uses one or more of the above and performs a function for an organization.

Examples of notable products and Products Owners include the following:

Self-landing rockets—Elon Musk

Electric cars—Elon Musk

iPhones—Steve Jobs

Polaroid camera—Edwin Land

Model T car—Henry Ford

Scrum—Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

These Product Owners were visionaries, people who imagined different methods of doing things, envisioned products to accomplish these things, and then caused these products to emerge. For these products to be remembered, their Product Owners had to guide them to maturity in the marketplace, where they proved themselves useful to people or organizations.

Scrum helps Product Owners during the visionary phase by simplifying demands on them. Product Owners who can excite, can envision, can cause the product to emerge are sometimes less skilled at managing and administering the product as it matures. That requires a person trained in more traditional skills such as manufacturing, inventory, marketing, sales, support, service, and invoicing. A Product Owner who has both sets of skills is the professional Product Owner.

Most of us are familiar with Product Owners who oversee products in the mature phase of their life cycles. To the extent that they are working closely with their stakeholders and are imbued with the vision, they are successful. Product Owners who also run the business, respond to market forces, and help the product morph as new technologies and ideas emerge help it to become more useful.

Senescence is a difficult part of the product life cycle. We have all seen products from IBM, CDC, Xerox, Kodak, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, Wang, DEC, and other organizations that reach this point in their life cycles. To the extent that these products are gracefully ridden into their graves, they sustain the organizations that hosted them through maturity. Now they are on life support. If they have been successfully carried through maturity, they may have provided an opportunity for new visionaries to come up with new products that can sustain the organization. Usually not.

This book describes how a person acting in the role of Product Owner can use Scrum to envision, emerge, and mature a product. Throughout the life cycle, the product is passed from person to person. In our view, it has to be passed from one accountable individual to the next accountable individual. That single person, the Product Owner, is responsible for everything that happens regarding the product, its value to its host organization, and to those who use it.

The Product Owner causes the product to live and grow in many different ways, such as development, partnerships, and interfaces. However, this one individual is the “buck stops here” person; he or she alone, not a committee or group, fulfills this function.

We have a great example of this in the United States with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the healthcare.gov site. When it was time for ACA to come to life, it didn’t. It didn’t respond on the Internet, it would not allow people to register, it confabulated data. And who was responsible for this disaster, this embarrassment? Nobody was sure.

A successful child has many parents. A failure has none.

—based on Tacitus, Agricola, ca. 98 AD

Eventually, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare said that she was responsible, but she meant only that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time – not the Product Owner.

If you have a product at some point in its life cycle, and you want to use Scrum to create more value in it for its users, you will be its Product Owner. This book aims to tell you how to do so.

This book is part of a series of books by Scrum.org known as the professional series. This series was founded on a uniform set of values that bind the people involved in work, so that they can trust each other, minimize waste, and succeed.²

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

This book is laid out in a way that assumes you have some Scrum knowledge. If you are new to Scrum, we suggest you look first at Part II.

We reference the official Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland (creators of Scrum) throughout the book and have made every effort to stay consistent with its language. For example, we capitalize official Scrum terms for roles, artifacts, and events the same way the Scrum Guide does.

Each chapter is relatively independent. Chapters are grouped into three parts:

Part I: Strategy—This part has very little to do with Scrum itself. Instead our focus is proper agile product management and maximizing the ROI of a product. We introduce the three Vs (vision, value, validation) as a way to achieve this.

Part II: Scrum—This part starts by defining empirical process control and how Scrum is a tool for managing complexity and continuous delivery of value. With help from the Scrum Guide, we define each role, artifact, and event with particular attention to the Product Owner role.

Part III: Tactics—Part III introduces more concrete practices and tools for managing Product Backlogs and release plans, and concludes by examining what it means to be a professional Product Owner.

Each chapter begins with a short quiz. The intent is to set the stage for the chapter by inviting you to think independently about the core topics. We review the quiz at the end of the chapter to determine whether your thinking has changed at all—consider it Test-Driven Reading.

We put a lot of thought and practice into the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner course we both teach and maintain. We feel that this book is a perfect companion to that course as it contains all the same information and much more.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading it as much as we do teaching, discussing, coaching, and writing about these topics.

—Don and Ralph

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1. “Scrum Guides,” Scrum.org, accessed March 4, 2018, http://scrumguides.org.

2. Other publications can be found or referenced at http://scrum.org.