Abstract

The term “product owner” was introduced with Scrum in the mid-1990’s when the product manager role had already been established in larger companies of the software industry. When a software organization tries to implement Scrum or a similar agile approach, the understanding and cooperation of “product manager” and “product owner” is usually a big problem that can have a very negative impact on productivity. In this presentation, we look at most recent survey results, analyze where the problem comes from, why it is so difficult to solve, and how solutions can look like in different scenarios.

Biography

Hans-Bernd Kittlaus is the chairman of ISPMA e.V. He is also the owner and managing director of InnoTivum Consulting which he founded in 2001. Before, he was Director of SIZ GmbH (Computing Center of the German Savings Banks Organization, Germany) and Head of Software Product Management and Development units of IBM. His main focus area is software product management. Hans-Bernd has been working as a trainer, coach and consultant for both product units and corporate IT organizations in a number of industries. He has trained hundreds of product managers in about 100 SPM training courses including all ISPMA training modules. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and has published numerous books and articles, his latest being “Software Product Management: The ISPMA-Compliant Study Guide and Handbook, 2nd Edition” (Springer 2022), and “Software Product Management for Startups: The ISPMA-Compliant Study Guide and Handbook” (with Haragopal Mangipudi, InnoTivum/guNaka 2023). He is Diplom-Informatiker (corresponds to M.S. in Computer Science) and certified as Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), and PRINCE2 Practitioner. He is a faculty member of Hari Shankar Singhania School of Business (HSB), Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, where the first 2-year full-time MBA program with specialization in digital product management is started in 2024.