Get the Best Free Ebook – Guide for Product Owners: Drive your Product to Success

Even the best teams can’t deliver a successful product without proper guidance. Your responsibility as a Product Owner plays a crucial role in the app development process. That’s why we’ve created Free Ebook: Drive Your Product to Success. A Quick and Easy Guide for Product Owners.

At Droids On Roids, we have been working in Scrum since 2014. During this time we have been engaged in various kinds of projects and have built more than 130 products with different Product Owners from all over the globe.

It has been a fantastic journey which allowed us to gain great levels of experience and to reach a practical mastery in our line of work. We are happy to share our perspective on what drives the development teams to build a great product. Check out the contents of our free Ebook for Mobile Product Owners.

Below, we present only a few excerpts from our free Guide for Product Owners. To read the whole Ebook, download it here.

A few excerpts from the free Ebook for Mobile Product Owners: Drive your Product to Success

TIP 1: Be aware that you are a part of a team

In Scrum, collaboration and transparency are the key components to unlocking and creating value.

It’s impossible to collaborate effectively without recognizing that you, as the Product Owner, together with the developers, QA (Quality Assurance) Engineers, UI/UX designers, and a Scrum Master, should create a synchronized team. Make no mistake – a Development Team is not an outsourced group of workers “building a bridge” on their own, based on the given documentation, and simply checked upon from time to time.

There is no “you” and “they” in a Scrum Team. Instead, there is a group of people who share a common goal of creating an outstanding product. This requires, under your guidance, dedication, and the proper skills to achieve the desired goal.

Secondly, like in every good team, each “player” contributes to the project’s success, in accordance with their given role. In order to avoid becoming a “football team” in which all the players play as goalkeepers or – even worse – without a goalkeeper at all, it’s particularly important to understand who is responsible for what.

To put it simply: You, the Product Owner, are responsible for “What?”. The Development Team is responsible for “How?”. The Scrum Master is responsible for the process. If you know your “what” well, then the Development Team will make sure to come up with the best, most optimal “how” and implement it through a smooth, painless development process, which is made possible by the Scrum Master. Read also: How to communicate with your Offshore Development Team – Tips for App Owners.

TIP 5. Be the decision-maker and the budget keeper

As the Product Owner, you plan and review the work the Development Team does every Sprint, keeping in mind what’s still in the backlog.

The decisions you’re making for every Sprint are inseparably linked to both the project’s overall budget and possible timelines. A good understanding of this process results in a lack of surprises when the time for payment comes.

The most important thing you might want to do, as a budget keeper, is to develop a proper understanding of Estimations. You cannot simply treat the rough estimate numbers as a guaranteed, rock-solid basis to build your entire budget upon. Instead, you should acknowledge that you will need to play an active role in the constant monitoring process.

The initial ballpark (a very rough approximation) – provided to answer the questions of “how much is the project going to cost me” and “how much time is the development going to take” – gets more and more realistic with every iteration. As we move forward with the development, the initial general requirements will get split into smaller chunks and will become much clearer. Moreover, some new requirements will most definitely appear. This is especially evident if the UI/UX design of your product is just a bit ahead of the actual development schedule.

A key to successful budgeting in a Scrum project is understanding that you, as the Product Owner, manage the budget through the Product Backlog. By asking the right questions, such as “are we on track?”, you need to prioritize and de-prioritize specific product features, adjusting the scope of each new Sprint to fit the budget, not the other way around.

If you want to know how to calculate the Estimation of a Scrum project’s budget, read the guide which can be found at the end of our Ebook.

Estimation formulas

Inside the Ebook, you will find:

• Sprint Cost Estimation Formula,
• Number of Sprints Estimation Formula,
• Development Cost Estimation Formula.

With the above-mentioned calculations, you will be equipped to maximize the development team’s work value delivered with every Sprint. Just remember to play an active role in the iterative inspect and adapt cycle. Read also: What’s the average app development cost?

5 killer tips on what you should absolutely avoid as a Product Owner

At the end of our free Guide for Product Owners, we added also some additional tips on what you should avoid:

1. Attending meetings late or not showing up at all. Remember that, if you force a team of a couple of people to wait for you, instead of maximizing the value of work, you simply waste your money on the non-productive anticipation of your appearance.
2. Changing a Sprint’s scope after it has been carefully planned and started. As a Product Owner, only you have the right to stop the current Sprint and decide that the direction of development needs to be dramatically changed. However, with iterations lasting only 5 workdays, such scenarios shouldn’t really happen, since the very short feedback loop is more than enough to effectively adjust to changes and plan the work ahead.
3. Keeping the Product Backlog empty. If you don’t provide information regarding which features should be developed next, there is simply no way to maximize the value of the Development Team’s work, not to mention responsible budget management.
4. Saying “ok, good” if, in fact, you are not happy about something. If you are not happy about something or not clear about any of the elements of the development process, don’t pretend that everything is ok. Give honest feedback and share your doubts.
5. Saying that all product features are “a must”. If you can’t prioritize the features of your product – deciding which ones are a “must-have” and which would be “nice-to-have” – you will most likely end up running out of budget, instead of launching a nicely working product which can be made perfect a little later on.

Wrap up

We hope, the excerpts described above, will make you decide to Download your Free Ebook and read it cover to cover. To sum up, you will learn:

• how you can deliver on your requirements and keep them prioritized,
• how you can calculate the Estimation of a Scrum project’s budget,
• how you can become a professional and engaged Product Owner, with whom the development team will love to work.

We wish you a fantastic journey as a PO!

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