Chapter 1: Introduction

Scrum is great for getting teams to deliver good quality software regularly, but that doesn’t really help if you are building the wrong thing! The Product Backlog is a key artefact to helping steer the team in the right direction. Yet sometimes the Product Backlog is just a long list of tickets logged by the business. Often Product Owners can’t see the forest for the trees. There are so many items in their backlog that the team have no idea what direction the product is actually headed. Even if you know what your backlog should look like, finding the time to get it in order seems impossible.

If this sounds familiar, this book is for you. We have worked with a number of business analysts and Product Owners who feel the same way. We found that sending Product Owners on two day theoretical training courses is not the answer. Instead we run short workshops where we work with the Product Owner’s actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog.

We have combined a number of these workshops into this book. We provide all our workshop plans, tips for facilitation, and teaching points to cover for each topic. You can use these workshops to help the Product Owners you work with to master their backlogs.

The chapters in this book each relate to a different topic on Product Backlogs. You can use the book in a number of ways.

• You could use all the chapters together to deliver a half or full day training course on Product Backlogs. We haven’t run this particular set of workshops in this way, as we prefer to do these workshops individually.
• You can use an individual chapter to run a workshop session on a particular topic of interest.
• You can use an individual chapter to give focus and structure to a regular working session on backlog management, for example a Backlog Grooming or refinement meeting.

In all cases we highly recommend using actual backlogs for people to practise the techniques. Occasionally we give an example to illustrate a technique. If you do that, ask people to practise the technique they have just learned on their backlogs.

Unlike our previous book on Training Scrum, we don’t assume you are an expert on the topics in this book. Not every coach and trainer have come across the same tools. If a topic is new to you, we have provided details of the points we teach for each topic in the C2 section. There are also links to blog posts and books we recommend on the topic on our website.

You only need the standard training kit mentioned in How to use this Series to run all the workshops in this book.