Product Ownership for Outcomes

If you look at most diagrams of the Scrum process, they depict Sprint Planning on the left, a circle in the middle that represents recurring Sprints, and the Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective on the right. Very rarely do you see a diagram with feedback from the Sprint's output back to the inputs of future Sprints.

Good teams, and good Product Owners, run their business to achieve outcomes for their markets. A sound Scrum enterprise is a partnership between the vendor and client, so that both benefit if the system realizes value. The focus is on generating value in deployment rather than conforming to a set of "requirements" that are just hypothesis of what might work. So instead of focusing on the checklist of met requirements at Sprint Review, good Product Owners follow the success and challenges of products in use. The focus is on optimizing the entire value stream rather than pronouncing success at the end of the Sprint.

This course explores concepts beyond the normal Product Owner skills and responsibilities of creating specifications and prototypes, team engagement, and release planning. It builds on fundamental notions of Scrum that are broadly misunderstood:

• a focus on specifications of the Product Owner's feature visions, instead of requirements;

• the Product Backlog becomes a list of tokens that represent powerful specifications instead of user stories;

• User stories become relegated to discussions on a napkin at the bar;

•  Product Owners drive the product direction by synthesizing broad, general solutions rather than product increments that meet only specific requirements.

Product Owners instrument products to assess market usage. Most important, they manage flow by matching the Scrum Team's output to market uptake, thereby avoiding overproduction and inventory. In addition, they use techniques like Macxy-Silbertson curves to judge when to split a value stream rather than overloading a successful product with more features (like evolving from the iPod® to the iPhone® to the iPad® and beyond.)

The course offers Scrum Alliance certification.