Customer Reviews

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although there are not many books out there on the market on product management from an agile perspective and it would be quite tempting to come up with an uncomprehensive, thick, large, theoretical book (and publishers like thick books), Roman Pichler withstood that temptation. Instead he came up with a very concise, thin, digestable and very well understandable practical guide for the complicated role of a product owner in an agile environment.

Although the book is quite thin with a mere 130 pages, I couldn't yet find a situation in the typical product owners live which is not covered in the book in some form with some practical advice. Rather than being abstract and counting down all possible solutions, Roman Pichler concentrates on a few solutions which it makes it easy to choose and apply them. This is his recipe for making the book applicable to everyday life rather than being encyclopedic.

I really think every PO beginner (and there are quite a few out there with the current rate of Scrum adoption) should have a copy of this book as well as the experienced one's as i is really worthwhile to take the few hours and sit back to rethink your role.

I am happy that this book is now published in contrast to the multitude of Scrum Master oriented literature.

As a project management framework, Scrum introduces many changes. One of the biggest is the role of the product owner who represents the users or customers of a product or system. The product owner is responsible for making sure the right product is being built and in the right order. This forces the product owner to think iteratively and incrementally about the product--rather than a small set of large decisions made at the outset of a project, the Scrum product owner makes many more but smaller decisions throughout the course of a typical development project.

This excellent book provides new and experienced product owners with the guidance they will need to work in this new way. The book focuses on precisely what you need to know in order to be a great product owner. Author Roman Pichler assumes that the reader is either an experienced traditional product manager learning Scrum or will pick up an additional book on traditional product management. This allows him to focus specifically on the unique product management challenges of using Scrum. He covers how to create a shared vision of the product, which is more difficult on Scrum as its iterative nature avoids a prolonged upfront specification phase. Pichler covers thorough coverage of creating a product backlog, planning a release, and collaborating with the team during the sprints ("iterations") of the project. He also provides advice on how to transition into the new role of product owner.

There is a shortage of fantastic product owners in the world. This book will help fix that problem.

The Product Owner role is key to effective Scrum and before Roman's book perhaps the most underserved in terms of available information describing the characteristics, responsibilities, and techniques for fulfilling those responsibilities.

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love epitomizes the agile approach. The book is short and concise while still providing comprehensive coverage of the both the role and responsibilities of the Product Owner as well as practical advice on performing effectively as a Product Owner.

The second chapter Envisioning the Product is by itself worth the price of the book. Roman has distilled the essence of this most critical activity, which unfortunately is all to often missed in the product development cycle, and provided some specific suggestions about how to envision a new product including a brief discussion on how the envisioning process itself can be achieved using Scrum.

The other chapters are equally valuable and provide concise, useful information that Product Owners (and ScrumMasters and Scrum team members) can quickly reference and benefit from.

Many books get read once and then put aside. I confident that won't be the case with Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love. This book is easy to read from front to back, and I'm positive my copy will become well worn as a reference I will continue referring back to as a just-in-time reference well into the future.

Whether your a Product Owner, ScrumMaster, Scrum team member, or just someone who's serious about creating better products, get this book!

As a Scrum trainer, I work with many teams implementing Scrum or trying to refine its use. For many of these teams, the role of project management must change significantly. A majority of Scrum books address PROJECT management very well, but none have sufficiently addressed the role of PRODUCT management. The reason, I believe, is because less is known about how to do product management well. Less is known about deciding "what" to make than "how" to make it. It seems we are really good at making the wrong products efficiently. This can be a challenge for Scrum teams as well; having a product owner who does not know how to manage a product (instead of a project) is quite common.

This is where Roman Pichler book "Agile Product Management with Scrum" comes in. I found myself glued to the book and annotating every page. The book is a perfect blend of the philosophy of managing the emergence of great products and how this is done as a product owner in Scrum.

The book is divided into six chapters that speak to the product owner as well as those that work with him. I found it especially valuable that Roman interspersed lists of "Common Mistakes" seen in the execution of the product owner role. I can honestly say, as I read through them, that I had seen them all.

This book is now in the "list of six" that I recommend to all of my students. I have this feeling that a last major missing piece of reference for Scrum has now been put in place.

I am really pleased that this book is now available as it is long overdue. I have read Roman's online posts and this book continues his history of giving sound advice by providing some very clear and understandable advice for the Product Owner role. The advice isn't necessarily easy to implement and I take some kind of comfort in that as the Product Owner role is not an easy role. I also like the size and shape of the book which makes it very easy to read and carry around.

Note carefully the title of this new book -- it's about "product" management, not "project" management. After all, isn't that what it's all about? That is, could there be a well-managed project that didn't produce the right product? We all know the answer to that question is, "Yes!" So, I'm really glad that Roman has decided to focus on the reason for the project -- and what makes me especially happy is that he knows his history. So many articles and books about agile development would have us believe that this exciting approach to development is startlingly new, when most or all of the elements have been around a long time. Thanks to Roman for pulling this all together for us!

A good book. The only problem I've with it is that at times the book sounds a little too academic. Every now and then I attend corporate training sessions and whenever the discussion turns to soft skills such as leadership, empowerment, commitment and so on, I invariably find myself suppressing my yawn or exploring the hitherto unexplored features of my mobile phone. There are a few times when this book transports me into that state, for example, when the author talks about the qualities of vision or empowering individuals or when he quotes Schwaber and Sutherland and Beck and others to drive home his point. Other than that it was a nice read for me. The author covers relevant areas like release planning, release management, stories (functional and non-functional), product backlog maintenance, sprint review, sprint retrospective, common pitfalls like feature creep and so on. So the tone of the book is not one that is purely designed to give you a toolkit to get up and running (the various charts and matrix), but one that meanders a bit around the soft skills for your team.

This is a brilliant book that explains everything in a simple and easy to understand manner. A great book for new product managers who want to understand agile and how it can be used to create products that work and are used by customers. The books explains in detail the product owner's role throughout the scrum process and the issues and difficulties you may face as well as ideas and processes on how to avoid or solve these issues.

It's also a great resource to return to when you need some help such as when products are over budget or your struggling to get buy in from senior management and because of this it is definitely a book to buy and have on the shelve. 100% recommend.

What a relief to finally find a concise, coherent, cogent book on the Product Owner role! I sit here tonight working on a wiki page to help introduce scrum to a state government agency which is sorely in need of agile adoption. We've ordered two copies for the IT library, my personal copy is heavily marked up, and our current proxy PO and ScrumMaster both have it in their hands.

This book is the perfect length and depth for a new PO coming in from the customer side of the house. The length is right for an executive to read and the content is sufficient to get a new PO up on their legs and interacting effectively with a newly certified Scrum Master and team who are chomping at the bit to engage with a real customer.

You can read it less than a weekend; you can read it in a long afternoon. If you're a CSM yourself: read it. CSM training often doesn't say enough about the PO perspective.

I look forward to seeing an enhanced edition. But if the author is too busy consulting to update this for a while, we can only thank him for what he's done in giving us this very valuable little volume.

It makes a pleasant change to read a book on Agile you don't need a crane to lift. I really enjoyed this book and as a coach I am now going to use it as homework for every new Product Owner I work with. The sections covering envisioning, planning and delivering a product are clear, easy to understand and unambiguous, making it very easy for new product owners to get a good understanding of the job. The more powerful sections of the book are the first and last. Understanding the role and transitioning too it, I think they are just great and really set the tone for what a product owner is really about. I also think they are great sections for any organisation that is trying to decide who to put in place should read these chapters.

Great book Roman I hope it inspires many more.