Brian Hartsock's Blog

I read an awesome post on Coding Horror entitled Are you an Expert. There is a great quote that really exemplifies what product ownership means.

Being an expert isn’t telling other people what you know. It’s understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction.

A product owner has to be so in touch with the product, that they can ask the right questions. If the right questions aren’t asked, a team will soon be working on tasks that were simply on the list, not tasks that are important.

I hate the term user story. Not because I hate user stories, but because people usually look at you funny when you ask them for it.

If this happens to you, instead of asking for user stories, ask who this is feature is for, what the feature really means, and why its important. Now you have successfully figured out the user story, without having to tell the requester to start their sentence with As a.

These pieces of information are super important in prioritization. In a month, if you don’t know why something is important because you forgot, well you can’t prioritize can you?

The product backlog is one of the hardest parts of using an Agile process in my opinion. It quickly becomes a daunting list of tasks that can be unmanageable. What I hate most is the subjectivity of picking what items should be worked on. How do you really weigh what it is important and what isn’t?

Mike Cohn gave a sweet presentation on just this topic. Listen up for Kano analysis, which I think is the simplest and probably most powerful way to weigh new features.