Week in the Life

Weekly Product Managers will:

Meet with users to interview and gather feedback Do not wait for a user to reach out to you, rather continually go out and gather information. Pre-IPM (Iteration Planning Meeting) 1x per week, Product Team and a team representative will meet to ensure there are stories to point for the IPM. IPM (Iteration Planning Meeting) 1x per week, Entire team will attend and point stories and ensure there is enough work for the week.

Retro 1x per week, A place for the team to discuss what went well, and what could be improved.

Demo 1x per week, showing users and stakes holders the progress being made on their product so that we can keep a shared understanding, tighten feedback loops, and have a place for everyone to interact in a controlled and timed environment. Note: This is what works best for the teams and companies I have led. There is no hard and fast rule. This is a reminder that all of the content in this handbook is not a rule, yet standards that have helped us with consistency and draw out conversation for better shared understanding and shared empathy.

Product Owner – WHYs –Whats- Hows

• Develop and adapt the product vision.

• Gather stories/tasks/tickets from Slack conversations as to track time & efforts better.

• Write new user stories – Jira Tickets - *

• Develop tagging system for easy to find tickets in Jira

• Breaking stories down into smaller stories/tasks/subtasks - *

• Driving Acceptance Criteria - *

• Acceptance tests- *

• Ordering the product backlog – Business value, goals, objectives

• Release Planning & Communication -*

• Grooming product backlog – as often as possible & re-groom Ready To Work with new competing tasks

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1. OBSERVE end users

2. OBSERVE engineers

3. OBSERVE developers

4. -LEARN – the market space, the customer, the users, problems, challenges, blockers

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• Critically think about the issues these teams are facing & start with the big ideas.

• Innovate around ideas that you hear the team bring up

• Talk with stakeholders of your products regularly – internal & external

• Help the team continuously improve their process – help to measure/metrics

• Reporting /Product Specific Insights

• Facilitate conversations

• Standup Daily

  • Provide iteration goals and new user stories for Pre-IPM.

  • Give feedback regarding the achievement of the goals in the review meeting.

  • Reflecting and taking action as a team member in RETRO.

  • Informing, helping, and learning in the daily scrum.

  • Giving feedback to the development team, during the Retro

    • work accomplished

    • process and interactions.

• DO NOT LET THE TEAM GET STOPPED BY LACK OF COMMUNICATION TO ANOTHER TEAM – remove silos – be the beacon of communication both in & out.

  • definition of done-*

  • definition of ready 2 work-*

• Tighten every feedback loop regarding the product – get in there -*

• Turn ideas into further products: ideally MVPs -*

  • Teaching every available member of all teams about Product - connect them with the product (make informed decisions together)

• Continuing to learn about product – reading books, podcasts, take classes

  • Develop community with other product owners-*

  • Play with the product

  • Refine the business values & product value streams-*