The Product Owners role typically encompasses the following areas, depending on the size and nature of the organisation	Sadly, many Product Owners only operate at the Product Backlog level meaning they fail to align the work to the strategy of the business.

Sometimes, they develop products with no consideration for the range of possible business models available. If Nestle had done this the Nespresso machine would just be another home espresso machine. Instead it has revolutionized espresso coffee and created a multi-billion dollar business. Likewise, Apple has revolutionized how we buy software applications using a totally different business model. The business model is often not considered by the PO. Significant value is often missed.

Without a strategic focus on Product Ownership, many organizations spend time and money building the wrong things for the wrong people with mediocre results. Scrum doesn’t fix this. A high performing Scrum team is like a Ferrari – it tends to go really fast. Sadly, if the driver doesn’t know where he is going then the Ferrari will go to the wrong place very quickly. The same often happens in Scrum.

Our Product Owner training aims to help remedy this by:

• Helping you define value at your organization. What is value and who values your products?
• Tracking and measuring value via a set of product value indicators
• Working together on ways you, as a Product Owner, can influence value
• Ways to order the Backlog
• Release strategies and product roadmaps - how they should drive the backlog, not the other way around
• Tools for forecasting fixed scope and fixed date releases.
• How to establish a baseline Product Plan
• How to minimize the Total Cost of Ownership of a product

These are designed to understand strategic value prior to a single Product Backlog Item being written.

Every feature we develop has a set of costs associated to creating it. It also has a set of costs associated to supporting it. Each additional feature we develop also adds to the complexity, testability and maintainability of the code base.

One of the best ways to increase project ROI is to stop so much software and only write features that customer’s value. We now have studies that show often 65% of features are either never or rarely used. There is a lot of cost we could save here. Imagine if this effort went into things customers valued.

The Product Owner is a business role and involves 

• defining a product vision that is aligned to the business strategy
• defining a product roadmap, based upon the product vision/concept
• defining a release plan to target customer needs
• working with a Development Team to turn this into a Product Backlog. 
• working as part of the broader Scrum Team to inspect and adapt progress towards the business objectives. 

Many Product Owners only work in the last two activities, spending their time writing Product Backlog Items and working with the Team. They don’t consider product strategy, measuring value and customer engagement. Sadly, a lot of value is lost.

Our Product Owner training is a good step in the right direction to help fix that.