Foreword by Brett Queener

There is a great movement taking place today throughout the software industry: the agile movement. Over the last two decades, many customers, partners, and employees have become disenchanted with the way we develop enterprise technology solutions. These solutions are often low in quality, take years to be brought to market, and lack the innovation necessary to solve real business problems.

At Salesforce.com, we aspire to be a different software company by focusing on customer and employee success. We knew that using traditional methods to deliver software just wouldn’t work for our vision of a different kind of company. We had to rethink the model, throw out our assumptions, and find a better way. We asked ourselves: Is there a way to deliver high-quality software on time, every time? Is there a way to get value into our customers’ hands early and often? Is there a way to innovate at scale as the company grows? In fact, there is.

As the chief product owner at Salesforce.com, I needed a way for my product managers to effectively connect the wants and needs of our customers and the business directly to the development teams in a highly dynamic and responsive way. Using Scrum allows us to put the product managers firmly in charge of delivering customer value. It enables them to direct the team to build the most business-critical features first and to get them into the hands of our customers as soon as possible. It also provides them with the flexibility to respond quickly to changing market conditions and competitive pressures, or to deliver terrific new innovations emerging from our development teams. In Agile Product Management with Scrum, you’ll see how a product owner differs from a traditional product manager having a greater level of responsibility for the success of the product. The book clearly outlines and contrasts the different behaviors between the traditional and the agile role.

Many have attempted to explain the product owner role, but none have been able to capture the essence of the role like Roman Pichler. This book offers compelling agile product management theories and practices that guide product owners, Scrum team members, and executives in delivering innovations. Roman provides plenty of real-world examples from highly competitive innovators like Salesforce.com along with simple explanations for building and delivering the minimum functionality to deliver innovations. He also outlines the common pitfalls and mistakes that many product owners make.

In today’s dynamic and competitive environment, our customers’ expectations and demands are greater than ever before. At Salesforce.com, our agile approach has provided dramatic results with our product owners delivering more innovation and value. If you’re interested in similar success, this book is for you. The spot-on tools, techniques, and advice are the perfect guide to deliver wild success for your customers.

Brett Queener, Senior Vice President, Products, Salesforce.com