Product Owner Anti-patterns Presentation Delivered at Shanghai Scrum Gathering
April 30, 2010 3:30 AM, SolutionsIQ.com Editor

Shanghai, China — 

SolutionsIQ's Monica Yap Delivered a presentation on "Product Owner" Anti-patterns at the 2010 Scrum Gathering in Shanghai, China, marking one of the early demonstrations of Agile thought leadership in that rapidly-changing country.  "Product Owner Anti-patterns", Monica explained, "are mostly driven by product owners who aren't aware of or how to be engaged in the Agile software development process.  This behavior, in turn, drives the project to failure, and deprives the team of the information required for success; Vision, Priorities, Insight into Minimum Marketable Feature sets, and Release Dates."

The Product Owner, as Monica related, should be actively contributing to the development process by seeking out stakeholders, helping them define the roadmap, prioritizing the backlog, and ultimately, seeking feedback & assistance from their own Scrum team. Product owners that don't follow these basic tenets contribute to the major anti-patterns; the Absent Product Owner, Assumption that new backlog stories are "already there" in older versions during application replacement projects, a Churning backlog, and Waffling definition of "Done", the lack of a single Product Owner, and missing Stakeholders.

Delivery of "Product Owner Anti-patterns" was a rousing success, and the PDF slidedeck is available here.  As Agile adoption continues to spread on the Asian mainland, SolutionsIQ's presence is expected to increase.