Master 65 Product Owner interview questions covering backlog prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and sprint planning.
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Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Story estimation is a key backlog management activity that affects several downstream processes. Product Owners play a significant role in this collaborative team process. Interviewers want to ensure the candidate understands how to facilitate the creation of reliable and efficient estimates for the products they are responsible for.

Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Remember that it is common practice within many teams for the Scrum Master or project manager to lead the story estimation process. While that may be true for your organization, it is best to describe your ability to lead this style of meeting while participating and collaborating with other leaders to resolve conflicts at the same time.

Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
During story estimation meetings, I walk my teams through the details of the user stories we need to estimate. I explain how the business intends to use the requested functionality, the value they expect to receive from it, and the priority of the stories. The development team asks questions and weighs in on the scope. We break stories down, add spikes, and adjust assumptions or acceptance criteria as needed.
After that, we give estimates for the stories. I have worked with story points and t-shirt sizing methods. Either way works, as long as everyone understands we are using a relative sizing technique and they have enough experience to relate the story to something similar from the past.
Each person gives an estimate, and we discuss why we voted the way we did if disagreements arise. In the event we still disagree, we typically yield to the person who has the most stake in the game for the selected story. I sometimes ask our Scrum Master for advice when a team is facing a new challenge or there is a serious disagreement that could benefit from an additional perspective.

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With our teams, we use Story Points as a unit of estimation, and Planning Poker as a technique to provide estimations. I've prepared a board with previous estimations and several examples for each amount of Story Points so that estimations are consistent and the team's velocity can be used to estimate epics.

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Written by Karrie Day
65 Questions & Answers • Product Owner

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By Karrie