From Internal Tools to Internal Platforms: Getting Started

As a product owner of an internal development tool part of my job was to talk to developers to find out how our tool could help them in their day-to-day work. To identify developers’ needs and provide solutions to them by means of our tool. And we were doing pretty well, I must say. Our […]

Product Owners Participating in Daily: Some Benefits

Even though the team I work in does not do Scrum, we do have a daily short get-together (our Daily) where we give each other an update on the topics we are working on. It’s pretty close to the definition of a Daily Scum. The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward […]

Skills I Miss Working Without Testers

For the past two years I am the Product Owner in teams that don’t have a dedicated tester. Within the team, we discuss in depth the implications of anything new we plan to develop and test before releasing a feature. Everyone has the best interest of our end users in mind and we all strive […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Understanding the Background

A couple of weeks ago I wrote down the reasons that make me uncomfortable talking to our users, as well as how I try to overcome them by analysing how our tool works. Soon I realised that just by looking at the situation as it is today that didn’t help me much understand why it […]

Trying Out the New GitHub Projects

I have been a huge fan of project management with GitHub issues since about 2013. There are two things that make it really appealing to me: The proximity to the code and the overwhelming simplicity that forced you to stay honest when you set up your process. Of course, the lack of a Kanban board […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Learning about the Product

As I wrote in my previous post I am not very comfortable talking to our end users. What helps me become more confident, is to have a better understanding of what I am actually talking about. To that effect, I started analysing our product to find out how its individual parts are working. Here is […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users

When I got my first position as a product owner, it didn’t take me long to start contacting our users. I was eager to find out what they were doing and how our tool could benefit them. My calendar was full of meetings and there were more opportunities to explore than the day was long. […]

Small Tips for Organising GitHub Labels

When it comes to project management tools, my favourite is GitHub issues. I find them simple to use and I like the issue-code proximity. Since adding a label to a repository is so easy, you might lose oversight of all the labels you have and why you have them. Here are some tips for anyone […]

My Product Owner Onboarding Checklist

When I started working as a Product Owner in the beginning of 2020, I didn’t know where to begin. There were the challenges of fitting in with the team as well as adapting to the new role. But besides that, there was simply too much to learn. To get started, I created a checklist of […]

Shifting my Quality Perspective: From a Quality to a Product Owner Role

Not having the word “quality” in my job description is something new for me. I went from “Quality Engineer”, to “Quality Product Accountable”, to “Quality Coach”, always being directly involved in the quality of the product or the process. Now as a product owner I am trying to figure out what is my role in […]

First Challenges as a New Product Owner

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 […]