Product Owner and Refinement Techniques 

For more than 15 years, I have been guiding organizations through their agile transformation. Regardless of the agile methodology chosen, I observe a recurring problematic pattern. Agile is introduced for implementation, but the requirements analysis almost always remains unchanged. In waterfall, we think things through first and make holistic concepts. That sounds reasonable. It's just that in complex environments today, we can no longer capture and consider everything in advance. Agile working models want to solve this problem by working out features/functions evolutionarily over short cycles and empirical process control. It is of little help to transfer the previously created concepts into user stories. The fundamental problem of uncertainty in requirements analysis remains.

Simply letting the teams implement the next best idea often leads to a certain lack of orientation in the product and leads to uncoordinated feature/function deliveries. Especially when delivery dates are agreed upon with stakeholders, the classic analysis is maintained to estimate the effort and set up a plan. This is then how a project can be managed. However, this leads to a sequential approach and undermines any agile approach right from the start..

There are some techniques, such as Impact Mapping, User Story Mapping, or Cell-based Splitting, which, when used correctly, help Product Owners and teams to resolve exactly this antipattern of requirements analysis. In combination with appropriate Product Backlog visualization and analysis techniques, it is possible to get a grip on the problem of predictability without jeopardizing the agile approach.

Therefore, I have developed a training in which these techniques are presented and tested in the context of the participants.