On Tuesday the 20th of October I'm chairing a panel on Product Owner best practices at the Scrum Gathering in Munich. I'd like to introduce my panel members. I've tried to balance out the consultant and authors with some people who are working with Scrum and Product Ownership issues on a daily basis in a variety of circumstances.
So (apart from me) who is on the panel?
Harvey Wheaton
Harvey arrived at Electronic Arts in 2003 to discover a wildly Agile environment. He says that his Scrum enlightenment came after about a year spent struggling to understand the organic, creative development environment and seeing the absolute need to focus on working software and iterative development. In September 2008, Harvey moved on to start up a new games studio in Guildford (near London) – Supermassive Games, an independent studio working on a multiple, publisher-funded Playstation3 exclusive titles. The studio has put Scrum at the heart of its culture and has grown rapidly to a team of 55 people working on four products for launch in early 2010.
Roman Pichler
Roman is as an independent consultant and product owner expert. His new book, Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love, is the product owner's essential guide to developing successful products with Scrum. Roman has more than eight years experience in helping companies transition to agile & five years experience in teaching and coaching Scrum product owners.
Nadja Fischer
Nadja is a Product Manager at Agfa HealthCare GmbH where she is responsibie for creating and maintaing the product backlog a Scrum team building an international patient administration system managing 43 sites, 70.000 users & 20,000 beds!
Nadja’s team have been doing Scrum for 18 months and are the first team in Agfa to adopt Scrum, whilst the rest of her company still works under a waterfall.
To make matters even more difficult, Nadja's team members are distributed across multiple sites in France and Germany. Despite their distribution they've found ways to successfully work well together as a single team.
Sven-Ole Bude
For the last seven years Sven has been a product manager for a variety of publishing solution products at ppi Media. He came in contact with Scrum in late 2007 and as a product owner he transferred a mission critical project from traditional product development to Scrum. He was part of the company’s Agile enterprise transition crew and coached several teams. He is about to start as product owner for an entirely new team this November.
William Water
William is a product owner working in a Scrum Team for Educator.
We'll be taking questions from the audience, so start thinking about what you might like to ask about, the focus is more on best practice and how to integrate with the business, rather than on "how too's" such as Release planning - all of which are covered excellently in other conference sessions.
Questions?
If you have any questions about the panel, please come and look for me beforehand, at the very least I'm sure to be at the reception on Monday Night sponsored by our good friends at VersionOne.