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The Definitive Guide to the What and When of Product Owner Responsibilities

The Definitive Guide to the What and When of Product Owner Responsibilities

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I'm in the midst of reading Specification by Example by Gojko Adzic. I'm a big fan of his earlier, Bridging the Communication Gap book so I've been anxious to read his new one. I'll post a full review when I'm done with it.

However, I wanted to share a sample chapter of the book here. I got permission from the publisher to share this chapter because it is about ePlan Services, a company I was fortunate enough to work with years ago. The company has some great agile team members. If you're familiar with much of what I've written you'll definitely know Lisa Crispin, co-author of the Agile Testing book. Others will know Nanda Lankalapalli, one of the leading agilists in India. ePlan is also home to Lisa Owens, whom many in my classes have heard me call the best ScrumMaster I've worked with.

There are many other great people there (Mike Thomas, Tony Sweets, Steve Perkins their product owner, and founders Mark and Dan Gutrich who truly embraced Scrum to allow it to succeed). In any event, Gojko has written a great chapter in his Specification by Example book on this agile team and how they do it. I encourage you to check out the sample chapter and indeed the full book.

Mike Cohn

About the Author

Mike Cohn specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques to build extremely high-performance teams. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile as well as the Better User Stories video course. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance and can be reached at hello@mountaingoatsoftware.com. If you want to succeed with agile, you can also have Mike email you a short tip each week.