Agile Product Management with Scrum

Author: Roman Pichler
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Pages: 160
ISBN: 978-0321605788
Print: 0321605780
Kindle: B003BW0C9I
Audience: New or prospective product owners
Rating: 4
Reviewed by: Andrew Johnson

The role of the product owner is explored within the agile philosophy.

 

 

You need to pay attention to the title of this book - it's product management not project management. To get anything out of it at all you have to already subscribe to the whole scrum flavour of agile philosophy. You probably also have to be a prospective or current "product owner".

A product owner is roughly speaking the person or entity responsible for the product, its success and its general well being -  a definition that could be argued over for hours. The idea is that the role of the product owner is necessary to counteract the "team" mentality where mistakes can be passed off to another and where there is perhaps a lack of focus on the task of building a great product rather than just getting the job done.

 

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This is very slim book and a lot of it is basically the art of the obvious. If you have been working with agile for a while it isn't going to tell you much you don't already know. Chapter 1 starts off the consideration with a look at the product owner's role. Chapter 2 is about envisioning the product and it covers the usual ground but it does so very well and occasionally goes a bit further  - minimal marketable product, ways of creating the vision, product variants and finishing up with common mistakes.

Chapter 3 is all about working with the product backlog; Chapter 4 is about planning the release; Chapter 5 is about collaborating in sprint meetings and the final chapter is on transitioning into the product owner role.

The whole book can be best summed up as a guide to scrum from the product owner's point of view. It's well written and hence easy to read. It's also short enough to read and not feel too cheated if it turns out not to be what you are looking for.

It's recommended if you are a beginning product owner or about to have to take on that role.

 

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The Object-Oriented Thought Process (5e)

Author: Matt Weisfeld
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Pages: 240
ISBN: 978-0135181966
Print: 0135181968
Kindle: B07Q3SGD1S
Audience: Developers using C#, C++, Java
Rating: 3
Reviewer: Mike James

Getting inside the object-oriented thought process is a trick worth knowing. Does this book hack it?



Embedded Vision: An Introduction (Mercury Learning)

Author: S. R. Vijayalakshmi and S. Muruganand
Publisher: Mercury Learning
Date: October 2019
Pages: 580
ISBN: 978-1683924579
Print: 1683924576
Kindle: B07YN6JC19
Audience: Developers interested in vision-enabled devices
Rating: 3
Reviewer: Harry Fairhead
The power of small machines is now well able to ta [ ... ]


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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 11 April 2018 )