I recently attended an Agile Development Product Owner class taught by Alistair Cockburn.  The content was excellent.  He taught us about the proper perspectives an Agile Product Owner needs to successfully interact with the project sponsors, users, and the development team.Alistair Cockburn has authored several books on Agile Development, and is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto.I would describe Alistair's environment as squirrely and fun.  We built user-stories out of the Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella stories (from the original Nicht fur Kinder European versions--full of violence and gore!)We also discussed the differences between Use Cases and User Stories.  I was happy to hear he prefers Use Cases, because so do I.All class attendees had already been through the Scrum Master course, so as we executed sprints for our product backlog, it was interesting to see how many attendees actually sought the sponsors/users feedback during the iterations--without being reminded.Overall it was an educational and enjoyable experience.

Mike J. Berry   www.RedRockResearch.com