SPEAKER
Optional Conference: Agile management, not just for managers
Bálint Erős
A Certified Scrum Product Owner and a first time Agile conference speaker, Bálint is a Business Analyst with more than 12 years of experience in providing and managing the requirements for in-house as well as outsourced, distributed software development projects for clients in Hungary, Germany, USA and the UK – mostly in the Online Travel industry. Once upon a time he simply used to walk over to the room next door where developers sat and just tell them what he needed… Then for years he created long and detailed use case documents and specifications, only to give up on that and start writing user stories. So far – by far – he has been enjoying the Agile world the most and loves working in a shared product owner role. Besides being a Chief Business Analyst at EPAM Systems, he is a father, a husband, a Rotarian at the Rotary Club Budapest-Center and an experienced World Traveller.
Product Owner Role: Share or Not To Share?
In an Agile software development project the goal is _very_ simple: “deliver a market ready solution on (or ahead of) time that brings the most business value”. We all agree it is a team effort, but in order for our product to ship successfully by all means, we need a captain. Well, not a captain, but a Product Owner.
We need a Product Owner who can monitor, discover and foresee market trends; channel in, listen to and organize all the requests from a wide group of stakeholders; manage, plan, document and prioritize all of these findings; and then align, clarify and communicate them to the development team(s). And probably most important of all: be available. To everyone. Always.
Can all of these requirements be efficiently met by a single individual?
And how about adding another dimension to the above compiled job description by distributing the team(s) geographically? Can this single person be always available? To everyone? At every location? In every time zone?
This talk will look at the feasibility of such a geographically distributed software development project from the Product Ownership’s point of view by introducing one potential solution. A solution that has worked for us and could be a reference point for you to set-up or fine-tune your own solution.