A Pocket Guide to Beta Testing – Part 1

Areti Panou1 Comment

A couple of years back, a team I was coaching wanted to organise a Beta testing phase for their newly developed product. Since I personally never set-up such an activity, I created a guide for them based on material I found online plus company specific information. Now, as a product owner, I want to try out for myself if what I provided back then actually works. So I thought I’d share some of my old findings and check how they hold up today.

Based on the resources I used, I identified four stages of Beta testing and created a questionnaire to guide my readers through it.Untitled2In this blog post you can find out what I came up with for the first stage, Setting up activities.Read More »

First Challenges as a New Product Owner

Areti PanouLeave a comment

Imagine it’s your first day at a new school and you are asked to join the basketball team as their captain and coach. Everyone is playing along nicely when you show up, the new kid. You have been playing basketball for some time but you never had any decision making position before. And now here you are, trying to figure out how to help the team score more hoops and keep the fans happy.

This is more or less how my first weeks as product owner felt like. I have been in software development for 10 years now, but never in the PO role. Our product is relatively new but being developed by an established team, in other words it is already in good hands. So, to be useful both for my team and product I realised that I needed to come to terms with some challenges.

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