Sprint planning can be one of the longest, most painful parts of the Scrum process. I have been in planning meetings that take a full day and still end with many questions up in the air. It is terrible. But it doesn’t have to be. Planning meetings have a singular purpose in my opinion: to define what the team is working on for the next sprint. Everything else is tangential. This is the real goal for me as product owner and development manager. »
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. »
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. »
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. »