#9: Ralph Jocham: Product Owner Demystified

Ralph is a change agent, author and a Scrum.org trainer since 2010. He has been agile for over 20 years and worked extensively with Ken Schwaber on many Scrum related topics. For many years he was the steward for the Professional Scrum Product Owner training at Scrum.org. He also authored the best-selling book about product ownership ‘The Professional Product Owner’ and gives guest lectures at a variety of universities. Ralph has been active in various fields in different countries. He started at a medical imaging software company in Germany and later joined Oracle in the UK. A few years later, Ralph left Europe for the US, first consulting at a bank in Manhattan, then relocated to the Bay Area to work for Applied Biosystems, a life science company. He also became a ThoughtWorker out of their San Francisco office helping clients such as LinkedIn, the Gap, Google and Roche Pharmaceuticals. Since 2009 he calls Switzerland his home where he founded effective agile, an agile training and consulting company, teaching over 7000 people on four continents.

About talk:

Vision, Value, Validation - The 3Vs There is a vacuum between the company vision and the final outcome, causing late validation and low value. This vacuum is present in pretty much all companies, caused by a wrong and ill conceived product delivery approach. This vacuum is filled with meaningless busy work and extensive task management resulting in being busy without a clear direction. As a Product Owner, it is your accountability to fill and manage this vacuum to help your company to get out in front of this problem and maximize value.