Kent McDonald introduces us to Arthur, a middle manager and product owner in a medium-sized insurance company who has been assigned to take on an agile project. For those unfamiliar with agile, the terminology and techniques of agile approaches can seem strange and often a little silly when not accompanied with an explanation as to why those techniques exist. Kent explains the challenges product owners like Arthur face and how to make product owners understand agile better.

To build and sustain credibility, good project managers focus on managing expectations and leave perception management to magicians. Explore the difference and find out why.

Everyone has a unique perspective on problems at work. Help your problems make it to the top of the queue by expressing them in terms of business value.

In classic Scrum textbooks, the Product Owner (PO) permanently hangs out in the agile team room, churning out a stream of user stories, regularly prioritizing the backlog, deciding color schemes for screen design-all while keeping the team focused and making coffee. In an enterprise agile project, it is physically impossible for one person to do everything the PO role requires. Elena Yatzeck believes the enterprise PO must be a team role, where the different people move in and out of their PO responsibilities in a disciplined and predictable way. To illustrate, Elena leads a simulation that takes you through a full enterprise agile project, providing shared PO resources to help you with each aspect of the project. She offers PO advice on organizational change models, team design techniques, extended story templates, and tips for backlog grooming.