Deliver It Cast

How do Product Owners handle having multiple backlogs for a single team? That was the question from a listener and in this episode, there will be some strategies and tips to help deal with this rather common issue. You might also find some ways to better tend to your own backlog as well. Got any favorite strategies, send them along! Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Mike Cohn - Is It Time to Do Away with Scrum's Product Owner Role Hilla Meller - Fuel and Friction: Five Behavioral Economics Lessons for Product Managers Ken Rubin - The Importance of the Product Backlog on a Scrum Development Project Perforce - Backlog Management: 6 Tips to Make Your Backlog Lean Anne Wiltshire - Reducing a backlog of work using lean EP100 Retro/Question board - Contribute here!

How do Product Owners, and other product people, fit into our company's structure? How does that structure work with the other parts of the organization to benefit your customers? In this episode, Josh Anderson joins from the Meta-Cast to discuss some ideas, questions, and thoughts around what makes a well-designed product org. It's especially relevant for PO's because we have a key role to play in how successful our teams, organization, and company will be. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Josh Anderson - nosrednAhsoJ on Twitter, www.kazi.io/ Marty Cagan - What it Takes to Build the Right Product Team Marty Cagan - Factors in Structuring a Product Organization Rich Mironov - How to structure Product Management Roman Pichler - Empowering Development Teams Maaret Pyhäjärvi - When the No Product Owner Breaks

Lately, Product Owners and others have been seeing and hearing a lot about "Business Agility". What does that really mean? To help explain and explore the concept and what it means for PO's Bob Galen joins us once again to talk about his writings and experience with the concept and where it came from. It is always good to stay informed about topics that you might get asked about and be able to understand how to talk about the topic with others. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Bob Galen - @bobgalen on Twitter, www.rgalen.com, www.agile-moose.com What is Business Agility? Creating Business Agility Stephanie Ockerman - The Promise of Business Agility Solutions IQ - The 2018 Business Agility Report Mike Cohn - Why you should consider stopping sprint reviews Wired - Can good design save lives?

When Product Owners hear or when we tell anyone "It's done". What does that mean? Do we mean it's mostly done, or done except for a few things we haven't finished yet. Is that really done? Unlikely. It helps to define in simple terms what a team, product, and group means when they say something is done. That's where the useful "Definition of Done" comes into use. Teams help create and understand what done looks like for them. PO's then make sure when we do use those famous little words, we actually mean it. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Tom Schwendler - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tschwendler/ Tom Schwendler - The Importance of Sharing the Same 'Definition of Done' with Your Software Development Partner Ascendle - What the Heck is the Definition of Done? Leading Agile - Definition of Done Scrum Guide - Definition of "Done" Ilan Kirschenbaum - Definition of Done vs. Acceptance Criteria Troubleshooting Agile Podcast - Troubleshooting Checklists Jim Head - Great Product Owners in Agile are a unicorn. Dean Takahashi (VentureBeat) - How game user interfaces can inspire better tech products

Product Owners often get focused on what or how we are doing things for our applications and teams, and not how often. When you take a look at when your product and information cycles happen you start to observe some real opportunities. In this episode, we dig in a bit deeper on those loops that PO's have and what's important about each. Finding and talking about ways to shorten the loop is the goal so that our learning can increase, our processes change, and we can adapt to our customers. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Black Diamond - Competitive Advantage: the OODA Loop in Agile Organizations Mind Tools - The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop Bob Galen - 4 Quadrants + 1 Jeff Gothelf - Lean, Agile, & Design Thinking

Gaining a deeper understanding of the users of our products should be high on a Product Owners to-do list. Building knowledge, information, and empathy with them will help us learn more about their issues and situations. An excellent technique for doing that is creating and sharing an Empathy Map that focuses on a specific person using your product. Building a map gets you out of your head and into theirs. That new perspective can help uncover ideas, perspectives, or issues your customer's faces. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Leading Agile - Why You Need Empathy Maps Adobe - 10 Tips to Develop Better Empathy Maps Rich Mironov - What do Product Leaders do? Elizabeth Ayer - Don't ask forgiveness, radiate intent

When Product Owners start hearing about MVPs, we really need to pay attention to who's talking and what they mean. MVP the term has definitely grown beyond its original meaning and frequently gets confused with many other things that aren't really related. There's a ton of information out there and we've shared some before. This episode tries to boil down some of it into something that you as a PO can use and take with you. Or at least a strategy to know when you're not talking about a minimal viable product anymore. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Jeff Patton - MVP: and Why We Confuse Building to Learn with Building to Earn Product Collective - Testing MVPs with your customers Melissa Perri - Finding the Truth Behind MVPs Henrik Kniberg - Making Sense of MVPs Product Love - April Dunford David Dame - Agile and Impatience are Inseparable

How do teams and Product Owners know if what they are delivering is the right thing? Most of the time, you don't, unless they are specifically treating their deliveries as opportunities to learn. The best way to learn? Try an experiment. In this episode, we are joined by two experts on product experimentation and how to get the most out of this practice. It's something that PO's are likely already doing, even if it's not on purpose. After this episode, you'll likely think differently about that. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Dave Karow - @davekarow & Trevor Stuart - @Trevorbstuart - https://www.split.io/ - @splitsoftware Split (ebook) - Understanding Experimentation Platforms Dave Karow - GOTO 2019 • Deliver Results, Not Just Releases: Control & Observability in CD Taplytics - How to Build an Experimentation Culture Mind the Product - Lean experiments: Tristan Kromer on better product process Julee Everett - 5 Tips to Increase your Emotional Intelligence as a Product Owner Andy Hunt - The Four Keys To Rapid Response Software Development

Product Owners need to understand that a significant component of how well the team is able to deliver, depends on their product architecture. In fact, it's often a limiting factor in how agile you really can be. Because it's so important, Allen Holub joins this episode to talk about what PO's need to know about architecture, why it's so important, and how they can help determine it's direction. All while keeping the main value and focus on the customer's benefit. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Alan Holub - https://holub.com, @allenholub Software Architect 2013 - Agile Architecture Part 1 - Allen Holub - Agile Architecture Part 2 - Allen Holub Michael Küsters - Agile Architecture Ron Jeffries - Story Points Revisited MindSumo - 3 New Product Successes (And Why They Won)

Ok Product Owners, how well do you know your flow? How well can you describe it to others? What's the limiting factor in your product, delivery, and even company? Unless you've created and shared a Value Stream Map, you really don't know. Understanding how work happens, where it bottlenecks, and how much time is wasted is extremely valuable to learn how to deliver value sooner. Customers won't care that there were extra steps, they want to use the product to solve their problem. Help others see how to do that better with a VSM. Feedback: twitter - @deliveritcast email - [email protected] Links: PO Coaching and Consulting - seek taiju Plutora - Learn the 10 Key Steps to Value Stream Mapping (VSM) for Software Delivery Tallyfy - Value Stream Mapping: Definition, Steps, and Examples Pace - Starbucks Coffee Goes Lean Martin & Osterling - Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation Glen Holmes - On Behavioural Economics Eugen Eşanu - 7 Basic Design Principles We Forget About