The First Guide to Scrum-Based Agile Product Management

In Agile Product Management with Scrum, leading Scrum consultant Roman Pichler uses real-world examples to demonstrate how product owners can create successful products with Scrum. He describes a broad range of agile product management practices, including making agile product discovery work, taking advantage of emergent requirements, creating the minimal marketable product, leveraging early customer feedback, and working closely with the development team.

Benefitting from Pichler’s extensive experience, you’ll learn how Scrum product ownership differs from traditional product management and how to avoid and overcome the common challenges that Scrum product owners face.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the product owner’s role: what product owners do, how they do it, and the surprising implications

• Envisioning the product: creating a compelling product vision to galvanize and guide the team and stakeholders

• Grooming the product backlog: managing the product backlog effectively even for the most complex products

• Planning the release: bringing clarity to scheduling, budgeting, and functionality decisions

• Collaborating in sprint meetings: understanding the product owner’s role in sprint meetings, including the dos and don’ts

• Transitioning into product ownership: succeeding as a product owner and establishing the role in the enterprise

This book is an indispensable resource for anyone who works as a product owner, or expects to do so, as well as executives and coaches interested in establishing agile product management.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

Concise coverage of just what product owners need to know - 2010-06-03
Reviewer Rating:
As a project management framework, Scrum introduces many changes. One of the biggest is the role of the product owner who represents the users or customers of a product or system. The product owner is responsible for making sure the right product is being built and in the right order. This forces the product owner to think iteratively and incrementally about the product--rather than a small set of large decisions made at the outset of a project, the Scrum product owner makes many more but smaller decisions throughout the course of a typical development project.

This excellent book provides new and experienced product owners with the guidance they will need to work in this new way. The book focuses on precisely what you need to know in order to be a great product owner. Author Roman Pichler assumes that the reader is either an experienced traditional product manager learning Scrum or will pick up an additional book on traditional product management. This allows him to focus specifically on the unique product management challenges of using Scrum. He covers how to create a shared vision of the product, which is more difficult on Scrum as its iterative nature avoids a prolonged upfront specification phase. Pichler covers thorough coverage of creating a product backlog, planning a release, and collaborating with the team during the sprints ("iterations") of the project. He also provides advice on how to transition into the new role of product owner.

There is a shortage of fantastic product owners in the world. This book will help fix that problem.

The book to read for Product Managers - 2010-08-13
Reviewer Rating:
One of the very best books for product management. It's a must-read-book for all Agile Product Managers. It is also very usable for developing product management even outside the scrum arena. A book straight to the point and easily accessable.

A major gap has been filled - 2010-06-05
Reviewer Rating:
As a Scrum trainer, I work with many teams implementing Scrum or trying to refine its use. For many of these teams, the role of project management must change significantly. A majority of Scrum books address PROJECT management very well, but none have sufficiently addressed the role of PRODUCT management. The reason, I believe, is because less is known about how to do product management well. Less is known about deciding "what" to make than "how" to make it. It seems we are really good at making the wrong products efficiently. This can be a challenge for Scrum teams as well; having a product owner who does not know how to manage a product (instead of a project) is quite common.

This is where Roman Pichler book "Agile Product Management with Scrum" comes in. I found myself glued to the book and annotating every page. The book is a perfect blend of the philosophy of managing the emergence of great products and how this is done as a product owner in Scrum.

The book is divided into six chapters that speak to the product owner as well as those that work with him. I found it especially valuable that Roman interspersed lists of "Common Mistakes" seen in the execution of the product owner role. I can honestly say, as I read through them, that I had seen them all.

This book is now in the "list of six" that I recommend to all of my students. I have this feeling that a last major missing piece of reference for Scrum has now been put in place.

a great book for scrum practitioners - 2010-05-17
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great book for Scrum practitioners. As well as emphasising the previously much-ignored role of the product owner, it also makes great further reading for anyone who is using Scrum and wants to "grow up" with it more.

The book is written in an easy, readable and informative style. There is much anecdotal content, and refreshingly, Pichler doesn't avoid expressing opinions based on his obvious wealth of experience as a Scrum consultant and coach.

As a Scrum master I have been involved in many Scrum projects over the years, but I found this filled in some gaps, and answered some questions for me. The emphasis on the Scrum Product Owner means that there is a lot of advice in the book which is germane to product release. This after all is what Scrum is about, and although this should be essential reading for anyone wanting to be a product owner, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has any role (or who is a stake holder) in a Scrum team.

Pichler tackles such issues as handling non-functional requirements and investigative tasks in the product backlog and sizing and detailing stories. He also discusses the large scale problems like having hierarchies of product owners, coping with dependencies across multiple Scrum teams and presenting product road maps to upper management, or customers, without violating the principles of Scrum. He also presents some interesting metric approaches for measuring velocity to address the "lack of predictability" problem that some teams find with Scrum.

There is good coverage of the importance of product visions, how much and how little to add, as well as recommending some techniques for verifying and creating them.

As well as clearly stated, sage advice throughout, there is also a list of anti-patterns or common mistakes at the end of each section, which will be all too familiar to anyone who has worked on a Scrum project. An excellent tool for pointing out to other team members that they are doing it wrong, without getting personal!

Absolutely required reading for any product owner wanting to ship successful products, and highly recommended for anyone who is using Scrum.

Disappointing - 2010-06-27
Reviewer Rating:
This book a very short one (118 pages). This is usually good news for me, as I spend a lot of time reading and hope this time be well invested. Also, the product management part of Scrum is something I consider 50% of the method. It's right now poorly documented and all the literature, experiences, tips and advices we could bring on this field are helping.
I was also lucky enough to listen Roman Pichler during a keynote. The guy is smart and interesting to listen. Unfortunately, the book is disappointing, very disappointing. The book is divided in 6 chapter, making each one a reasonable size. But each time, I simply get the impression that we only scratch the surface. Most of time, we grab a PO from the field, because he is proactive, he had a real vision of something going beyond what we actually do, he knows the business damn well. This is when we are lucky. But most of the time, he could buy Scrum but need a lot of guidance to translate his ideas and what he is capable to do into Scrum. The book exposes all the issues, but miss the real help, the real tricks that could help the PO.
The good news is: all the subject that matters are here. For instance, the product vision is discussed in chapter 2. One of my favorite subject. But I doubt that the PO could go to build a vision with that material, he would find guidance elsewhere. And it's true for about all subjects: capturing requirements in backlog, sorting and grooming the backlog.
Well maybe because I'm an agile practitioner for quite some time, I was disappointed to not find anything I wasn't aware of. Maybe this book should considered as an introductory book, a positioning where it is OK. But I'm not sure that it was what the author had in mind. If it is, it should be clearly stated, and it missed pointers (actually there is pointers, but no "if you like to know more" pointers) to in depth literature on each subject. There is such literature, not in the agile sphere most of the time, but there is. It's one of the duty of an author to find them out, and forward the reader to them when it makes sense.
If you're a PO, new to Scrum, go to this book. It's an easy and quick read. But don't stop here, it's only the beginning.

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