Dave West of Scrum

As Agile become mainstream increasingly organizations are looking to double down on the role of the Product Owner encouraging them to manage the intersection between technology and the business. But Product Ownership is a difficult role as it tries to balance the needs of the business with the reality of software delivery. Also, for many organizations there is some ‘confusion’ with existing roles of business analyst, product manager or even project manager. What does the product owner do anyway? In this talk Dave West, Product Owner and CEO Scrum.org, the home of Scrum, describes the genesis of the Product Owner role and how many organizations are dealing with the challenges of slotting this key role into existing product, project and release roles. He will introduce some techniques such as user centric design, and hypothesis based development and describe how approaches such as Lean Startup and pragmatic marketing are providing product owners with a tool box to do their job.

Biography:

Dave West is the product owner at scrum.org. In this capacity, he engages with partners, and the community to drive scrum.org’s strategy and the overall market position of Scrum. Prior to joining the Ken Schwaber and the team at Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company’s executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100.As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, that helped define new software modeling and application development processes. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organizations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile-based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise.