Presenter: Peter Janssens

Objective(s) of the session:

As a participant, you will

  • get a short but interesting view of the product backlog management flow
  • share experiences with and learn about best practices as product owners.

Experiment: let’s not make it another “free” session:

  • you will go home with tangible outcome
  • if you agree there is follow-up on what you really applied after this session.
  • at the end of the session you will receive feedback what previous session participants learned and applied in reality

Contents:

Managing a product backlog is simple: list your stories, prioritize, estimate and have stories pulled by your development cycle. That’s easy in theory. Daily reality reveals lots of challenges however. Participate at this session if you want to learn more about

  • Agile striptease (=a way to split end-to-end user stories into different dimensions)
  • Kanban board product backlog management
  • Visual project representation & prioritization
  • Fail fast & transparent stakeholders communication
  • Using examples – requirements – acceptance cases as a single thread
  • Many more… [suggest your extra best practices to discuss]

As a participant, you get an interesting product backlog management flow overview as warming up, and you have a vote which best practices will be discussed, or you can suggest others.

Format and length: 120 min presentation + iterative group workshops (timing can be adapted but 120 min is preferred)

Process and timetable:

  • 1) introduction (presentation, I will try to do this without slides): max 15 min.
  • 2) iterative group workshops (total 15 min + 5min/group)
    • a) select (a) best practice(s) by the audience: 5 min
    • b) group discussion & elaboration: 10 min
    • c) presentation: 5 min /group (nr of groups, and total duration of all presentations will depend on the audience size)
  • 3) conclusions + feedback on what former participants really learned & applied after attending tryout sessions (more info: see session objectives)

Intended audience and prerequisites:

Product owners, product & program managers, testers, project managers, people interested in the organizational aspects of software development/Scrum/Kanban/… At least 1 practical experience with backlog management is required to level public expertise on this domain.

What do the presenters expect to learn from the session?

I am very curious

  • which extra usable best practices will be presented by the audience
  • how/if the practices will be understood & used in practice

Materials needed, room layout, limitations...:

No participant limits as the group size & nr of iterations can be flexibly adapted. Standard materials Need possibility to hang up 1 A3 or flipchart paper per best practice.