Note: event starts 13:00 AEST (Brisbane) time - convert to your local time here or add to your calendar if in doubt! 

Michael James, Scrum-trainer-extraordinaire (selected by OG Ken Schwaber in 2006), will share stories of many companies going down the wrong path with product owners and weakening Scrum. Michael will suggest better ways of handling the product owner role in complex organizational settings. He has created the world's most popular online learning resource for Scrum (https://ScrumTrainingSeries.com ), the most successful illustrated distillation of Scrum's definition (https://ScrumReferenceCard.com), and the most quoted scope declarations of the Scrum Master role (https://ScrumMasterChecklist.org .)

This talk is brought to you by the Accenture Sales and Pricing: Engineering, Scrum and LeSS Community of Practice but the event is open to everyone in Accenture and everyone in the Atlassian community including hands-on developers, organizational leaders, HR personnel and organizational coaches.

Imagine working for a large organization, where everyone is focused on team productivity. Very quickly, you realize that not a single team works on a whole product but only on its limited parts/components.. Each team has a “team-level backlog” and is assigned a "team-level product owner", whose responsibility is to ensure a team's efficient delivery and high output.

As a result, not a single team has a good understanding of the whole product.

Not a single team-level product owner has authority to make major business decisions with respect to a whole product. Instead, a so-called PO operates more as a Team Output Owner ("TOO"), focusing on velocity, capacity, productivity, dependency management and other administrative initiatives, whereas in Scrum, a product owner maintains her focus on an entire product backlog, not just a part. You also realize that with large products, the above approach leads to excessive complexity, coordination overhead and organizational waste.

Prior to attending this event, please watch Michael’s excellent 10-minute video or check out his comic book.

About Michael:

Michael James, Seattle's Scrum expert, was selected as a Scrum Trainer in 2006 by Scrum's original proponent, Ken Schwaber. Michael has helped countless organizations in many countries, garnering over one hundred written recommendations on his LinkedIn profile.

Michael has been involved with LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) longer than anyone else on the USA West Coast. He is a recovering "software architect" with programming experience back to the late 1970s, and including control systems for aircraft and spacecraft -- some of the most deterministic, high-quality systems ever built. If you have been an airline passenger, you have probably already used Michael's software. Michael's automated test experience predates the "eXtreme Programming" movement.

Michael has been featured in DZone, SDTimes, Gantthead, and Better Software Magazine.