As part of a long-running Product Owner training I hosted, I was offering a Lean Coffee where every participant could ask questions and bring challenges, which would then be discussed and answered by the full group.

Here, I will collect some interesting questions that have arisen, as well as the answers we found.

How do we handle stories that we don’t understand?

Product Owners often need to deal with very technical stories that they barely understand. To be successful, they only need to understand a few key aspects.
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How do we stop talking about issue numbers and start talking about what matters?

“I worked on FOO-2342 today…” Issue numbers during the standup do not provide any value at all, so we should get rid of them during the discussion.
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When or how often should you change your product vision?

The product vision is a living thing, that needs to be updated when our assumptions about the market change, or if our ability to get there is changing.
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How strictly should we stick to the rules of Scrum and Kanban?

When it comes to Scrum and Kanban, can we pick-and-choose from the rules, or should we follow all the rules to the letter?
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How to sync information between teams?

Syncing information between teams is hard - here is a simple idea on how to get started.
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What’s the use of the team self-organizing their work if the solution is clear?

For many organizations, this is scenario is a classic: The most important task can only be done by a single developer. If things are that clear, then why shouldn’t Product Owners assign work to them directly?
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Why prioritize?

If everything is important due to customer commitments, promises, escalations or other reasons, why should we even bother prioritizing?
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