Kent McDonald introduces us to Arthur, a middle manager and product owner in a medium-sized insurance company who has been assigned to take on an agile project. For those unfamiliar with agile, the terminology and techniques of agile approaches can seem strange and often a little silly when not accompanied with an explanation as to why those techniques exist. Kent explains the challenges product owners like Arthur face and how to make product owners understand agile better.
What prevents product owners in large organizations from functioning like product owners in startup companies, who quickly release new products in the market with lower budgets?
In Scrum, the Product Owner role is the one person responsible for the project's vision and direction. He or she leads by communicating with the team, outlining chunks of work through the composition of product backlog items and then prioritizing those items.
In this final installment of a three-part series on product owners in the agile enterprise, Dean Leffingwell provides several case study "vignettes", which illustrate how specific agile enterprises found the right people necessary to fill this role, along with some of the unique challenges they faced and the solutions they applied.