Writing good user stories and planning effective product releases is difficult. Simple story templates and prioritization heuristics offer short term relief, but teams still struggling under mountains of stories of questionable quality.

In this short workshop you’ll gain a deeper understanding of why the simple idea of stories can be so difficult. Armed with deeper understanding you’ll learn not to write stories, but to discuss your product and plan its release while creating an organized story backlog as a natural outcome of conversation.

When the customer is not at the site, the Product Owner of the team is but a proxy that tries to translate the customers needs to detailed functionality. To make sure the customer is happy, the Product Owner needs to discuss solutions, and needs to get questions answered quickly on behalf of the developing team. We have collected and tried out various ways to bridge the gap between the team and the remote customer, who is the real Product Owner. This talk gives some examples on what went well, and what can be done better.

As a Product Owner, you need to understand the value of the technical practices your development team do use to understand the value of spending time improving how the team uses them. Knowing more about this will also enable you to demand that they start using the technical practices you deem most valuable to your product. In this talk, I will present the most important software development practices that you as a Product Owner should know about, with focus on the value they bring and not the specifics on how they are implemented.

Stealthholders appear at the final demo and destroy your project without warning. Shapeshifters are different people every time you talk to them. And Sergeants won’t take no for an answer. In this action-packed workshop, we’ll demonstrate and practice ways of managing these challenging, but regrettably common, types of client without sacrificing the principles that make agile projects work.