TL; DR: Product Owner Interview Questions — The Product Backlog and Refinement
If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients.
So far, this Product Owner interview guide has been downloaded more than 8,000 times.
Scrum has proven to be an effective product delivery framework for all sorts of products. However, Scrum is equally well suited to build the wrong product efficiently as its Achilles heel has always been the product discovery part. What product discovery part, you may think now. And this is precisely the point: The Product Owner miraculously identifies what is the best way to proceed as a Scrum Team by managing the Product Backlog. How that is supposed to happen is nowhere described in the Scrum Guide. Consequently, when everyone is for themselves, product discovery anti-patterns emerge.
From sunk costs, HIPPO-ism, my-budget-my-features to self-fulfilling prophecies — learn more about the numerous product discovery anti-patterns that can manifest themselves when you try to fill Scrum’s product discovery void.
TL; DR: A Forensic Product Backlog Analysis (Part 1)
Garbage in, garbage out: No matter whether your team chose Scrum for the right purpose—solving complex, adaptive problems. No matter whether your Scrum Team’s product quality is top-notch or whether your teammates embrace self-management to the fullest. If your Product Backlog is not up to the job, all of these accomplishments will account for little, as your team will provide less value to its customers than possible. Here is where the forensic Product Backlog analysis steps in, a light-weight, simple practice to help Product Owners and Scrum Masters unearth anti-patterns that led to your low-value Product Backlog.
Learn more on how a piece of paper and a pencil can turn around the perception of your Scrum Team among stakeholders and customers.
The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of a holistic product creation perspective.
The theses cover the accountabilities of the Scrum Master from product discovery to product delivery in a hands-on practical manner. On the one side, they address typical Scrum events such as Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective. On the other hand, the Scrum Master theses also cover, for example, the relationship with the Product Owner, they deal with agile metrics, and how to kick-off an agile transition, thus moving beyond the original framework of the Scrum Guide.
The Scrum Guide Reordered 2020 is based on about 95 percent of the text of the Scrum Guide 2020, extending its original structure by adding additional categories, for example, on self-management, commitments, or accountability.
The Scrum Guide–Reordered allows you to get an understanding of Scrum-related questions quickly. For example, it is good at relating a specific topis — say “stakeholder” — with Scrum’s first principles such as Scrum Values, or empiricism.
The Scrum Guide 2020 is available now: Change is coming to make Scrum more accessible and inclusive beyond software development. Learn more about the changes, download the brand new and free Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered to spot patterns quickly, and join the Scrum community discussion.
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