Product Owner

Product Owner role, Scrum Product Owner meaning, Agile Product Owner responsibilities, professional Product Owner certifications

Product Owner is a single person business representative role that maximizes the product value, manages the product backlog, interacts with the stakeholders, represents the customer, maintains the product vision and optimizes the value of the work performed by the Scrum Team.

The PO is responsible for the order and priority of the items in the Product Backlog, for ensuring that the items are clearly expressed and understood, that the product backlog is transparent to the Scrum team and stakeholders, reviews the work performed by the team and ensures that the highest value is delivered every sprint.

Product Owner role

The Product Owner talks to the stakeholders or the users and understands the product vision from them, understands their challenges and what kind of problem they are trying to solve, then comes back to the team and helps the team understand what are some of the needs and the challenges that the team will be solving with the product that they are developing. The PO writes simple descriptions of features from an end users perspective, then prioritizes the backlog of work for the developers in a way that enables them to know exactly which ones to work on first.

Being an individual and not a committee, the Product Owner represents the vision and direction of the stakeholders, being influenced by stakeholders or scrum team members, but having the final say on decisions about what needs to be built. Being accountable for the product backlog means that although anyone from the scrum team may update or change the product backlog, they must do it wit the product owner’s knowledge.

Attributes of the Product Owner

  • Visionary – focusing on the future and clearly communicating the product vision, strategy, business goals and objectives
  • Collaborator – supporting people in the discovery process, engaging with and closely working together with the various stakeholders and developers
  • Customer representative – explaining how the work affects the customers and users, helping others to understand what the customers need, what their challenges are and what pains and gains they have
  • Decision maker – taking decisions fast or delegating them to the Scrum team, helping the stakeholders and Scrum team to keep time-to-market short, by keeping decision making time short
  • Experimenter – understanding the need of trying out new things, exploring, innovating and experimenting, stating hypothesis, explaining what we know and what we don’t know, seeing the work as experiments rather than work packages set in stone
  • Influencer – helping the stakeholders to align around the product vision, strategy, goals and objectives, using effective communication, negotiation and influencing skills to get stakeholders and the Scrum team to join the common cause

PO responsibilities

  • manage stakeholders relationship
  • act as a primary point of contact for stakeholders
  • understand customer requirements
  • create and communicate the product vision
  • create and communicate the product roadmap
  • define the Minimum Viable Product
  • maximizing the product value
  • gather and implement client and user feedback
  • anticipate customer needs and test assumptions
  • define user stories
  • manage and prioritize the product backlog
  • involve actively with the development team
  • oversee product development
  • be a liaison for stakeholders and team members
  • assess product progression

PO characteristics

  • Team player
  • Motivator
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Ability to say no
  • Domain knowledge
  • Communicator

Product Owner certifications

  • Certified Scrum Product Owner – CSPO – Scrum Alliance
  • Advanced Certified Scrum ProductOwner – ACSPO – Scrum Alliance
  • Professional Scrum ProductOwner I – PSPO I – Scrum org
  • Professional Scrum ProductOwner II – PSPO II – Scrum org
  • SAFe ProductOwner/Manager – POPM – Scaled Agile
  • PMI Agile Certified Practitioner – PMI-ACP – PMI

Scrum