What Not to Build

I attended the "Certified Scrum Product Owner" course at Helsinki last month. Kenny Rubin was the trainer. He gave some very useful insights to the group about what exactly is the role of a PO in an agile project. There were some lively and interesting discussions going on the room for those two days.

Here are a few key points that I felt worth noting in my notebook during that course:

* Good product owners generally hate "work in progress".
* Real and active product owners 'must' see and approve the sprint content / demo before sprint review.
* User stories are not contracts.
* 'Definition of done' for user stories may get modified as result of interim demos.
* Product owner is not a tester. He should be presented only functionally tested stuff. He then may do user acceptance testing.
* Product owner's boss can not change the priorities in the product backlog! He may add requirements though.
* If a product owner plans for extensive documentation, he must also keep in mind that he is responsible to maintain it.

Last but not certainly the least:
* A good product owner should always "be there" for his team.

Finally, I leave you with the opening lines of Kenny while he was giving us the traditional introduction about "Why Agile?"

"...Let's assume we are a team, assembled here on day-one to kick off a brand new, huge project. In future will there be any other day when we'll know any lesser about this project than what we know today? Now, when do you think we should make all the crucial decisions?..."