OWN IT – 8 Simple Secrets of Product Owner Success

The Definite Guide to Success as Product Owner

The 8 Secrets of Product Ownership reveals how experienced and successful Product Owners achieve great results and keep the development teams’ motivation high!
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I am an experienced agile and team coach, as well as expert in Product Ownership. I can train or coach you to be a better Product Owner. I can also transform your teams’ to learn faster and achieve better results. Guaranteed!
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What are people saying?

“Your products live or die with Product Owner competence. This book is the essential guide to make your products succeed!”

Henri Hämäläinen, CEO, Contribyte

 

 

“Arto’s book is a clear demonstration of his humanism, passion, and vast experience in software development processes and best practises”

Petri Bäckström, IT Director, Clausion

What Is the Principal Concept behind the “8 Secrets of Product Ownership”?

The work of Product Owners is extremely rewarding. You get to create new things together with highly skilled people. You get to solve real end user problems. But the drawback is that the life of the Product Owner is busy and hectic. Unless you have a good understanding of the tasks, routines and ways of working that lead to success, you are at risk of drowning in the everyday mess of requests, bugs, EPICs and stories.  By finding a mental model, a structure that helps you focus and remember everything that is important, you will find it much easier and enjoyable to work as a Product Owner! This is what my book will offer you.

The 8 Secrets:
Purposeful Planning
Focus on the near term, low uncertainty events, making sure that the next weeks and months have valuable work that’s clear, understood, and high priority. The Product Owner cooperates with others on the long-term outlook
Fantastic Feedback
A successful Product Owner seeks and provides fantastic feedback, using constant customer iterations to optimize the value of the team releases, and improving the team actively by coaching and giving feedback on the team performance. Everything the Product Owner does is done with high transparency.
Optimal Ownership
A successful Product Owner displays optimal ownership: When needed, the Product Owner boldly drives the team forward, basing every decision on a shared vision and actively delegating tasks to the self-organized and empowered team. The successful Product Owner is also able to take a step back and see the big picture and how her product fits in it.
Team Tactility
A successful Product Owner practices team tactility, being available for the team for questions, steering, comments, and complaints.
Mind the Minors
A successful Product Owner minds the minors, instinctively prioritizes everything based on market feedback so that the team is constantly aware what is highest priority, what is the release scope and spends time on things that generate best return on the time invested.
Earn and Learn
Earn and Learn: Release frequently and on schedule, the release containing a logical and an easy-to-sell set of features that are implemented with high quality, and no showstopper surprises after release. You achieve this by making sure that the team works in a sustainable way, not overloading itself, produce high quality deliverables by working in small enough, vertically integrated backlog items. The quality is kept near production level throughout the development, maintaining a constant release capability.
Positivity to Profit
A Successful Product Owner understands that positivity results in profit, emphasizing low-stress, fun, and happiness as sources of creative solutions and sustainable delivery of high quality.
Aspire to Excel
A successful Product Owner makes sure that she individually and the team aspire to improve with a purpose, and spread their excellence to other parts of the organization

About Me

I have worked for over 20 years in product development, in different roles such as R&D Project Manager, Program Manager, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Test Engineer, R&D Team Lead, R&D Manager, and R&D Director. My agile experience is over 10 years: Scrum, Kanban, both from Scrum Master and Product Owner points of view. I have experience on leading complex R&D projects that span multiple cultures, countries, and across large time zone differences. I worked 15 years in Nokia, in different product and service areas such as mobile phone software development, digital service business and venture programs, and others. After my Nokia career, I was leading the R&D organization in a small software company for 5 years, while also working as Product Owner.

As a trainer and coach, I have helped small and large companies and projects and programs of widely different industries transition to more effective and agile ways of working. Speeding up the path to reduced waste, increased efficiency, and superior team-learning and morale are my main strengths and passions.

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