Self Study – From Product Owner to Product Manager
Many Product Owners begin without formal training. When they attend a Certified Scrum Product Owner course, we have to take the time to unlearn habits and mindsets based on how their employer interpreted Scrum. Because we spend time unlearning bad habits, we only scratch the surface of a Product Owner’s true potential.
If your goal is to master the role of a Product Owner, I recommend you complete an A-CSPO course. In that course, we share with you a broad collection of tools and frameworks that will inspire and provide you the confidence to succeed in your role. But what if you don’t have the time to take another course? Or maybe you prefer to study on your own over a few months?
Here are six books, taken from our deep-dive Product Owner immersion program, that we use when our clients want to upskill their Product Owners. I believe all of these books work well as a self-study program and, like our clients, will broaden your product management perspective.
- Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories: user stories are such an easy concept to grasp and try out on your own, but much of the advice you find on the Internet is simply bad. In their book, Gojko Adzic and David Evans fix that problem by giving you specific, well-proven ideas on how to get yourself out of this mess.
- User Story Mapping: I am not exaggerating when I say that Jeff Patton’s book is one of the strongest volumes on the topic product management for Product Owner. Not only does this book improve your user story practice, it discusses how to be a better product manager.
- Innovation Games: this slim book by Luke Hohmann introduces twelve, easy-to-understand, easy-to-use frameworks used by Product Owners and product managers when they want to build impactful, software-enable products and services. This was one of the first books I read as I began my product management journey and I am confident you will reference this book for years to come.
- Value Proposition Design: I just love this book by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur! In addition to being beautifully designed, it is full of relevant and useful information on how to design customer-centric products and services. In fact, I used many of the practices and techniques from this book to develop and launch my first product, CSP Fast Pass.
- The Journey Mapping Playbook: I don’t know about you, but the first time I saw a customer journey map, I was completely overwhelmed. On one hand, I was impressed at the beautifully drafted diagrams. On the other hand, I was lost on where to begin. Have no fear, Jerry Angrave describes the entire process of creating a customer journey map from preparation, making the case to build a journey map, facilitating the event and post-processing the data.
- Don’t Make Me Think: this introductory book (now in its third edition!) on user experience (UX) was the first book I read on the topic of usability back when I was still writing code. If you have no UX designers on your Scrum Team or no experience with UX, this book by Steve Krug will serve you well
