The Product Owner Role

The Product Owner role is an intensely important role. This individual is what I consider to be a “Value Driver” to the product. Meaning, Product Owners are the ones who drive value into the products and projects that they are working on. The Product Owners ensure that the right product is going to be built by the team and has the right conversations around what the team needs to specifically build. They also create a prioritized backlog, or ranked list of items or requirements needing to be built by order of importance. A primary component of the Product Owner’s job is to ensure this list is constantly groomed, or updated as things change.

A successful Product Owner understands how they uniquely represent their end-customer, whether it be internal or external. The Product Owner should intimately understand the needs of their customers they are representing and be able to create the right amount of requirements, prepped and ready for conversations with the team to elaborate or expand on them.

Since the Product Owner is such a crucial part of driving value to the team, it is necessary for them to be actively engaged within the development team’s progress. Therefore, it is important that they participate in the right amount of meetings while being available to the team when needed to help give direction, course-correction, or more information that the team can use to help them build the right product. The consistent engagement from the Product Owner also allows him to communicate the progress of the project to the right stakeholders and interested parties in the success of the team. In a lot of ways, the Product Owner is not only an internal champion for the success of the team but also a representative leader to the rest of the organization.

It is imperative that the Product Owner inspects the product at the end, and gives their stamp of approval on the completion of the right requirements. This most critical part of the process is where the Product Owner has the responsibility of making sure the iterative product is not only being built right, but the trajectory of the team is moving in the right direction.

The Product Owner is not an individual, they are distinctly part of the team, and as such, have a highly collaborative role to play within the team. The duties of the Product Owner are to be executed with a servant-leader attitude. Some adjectives that come to mind included: engaged, available, informed, empowered, prepared, communicative, collaborative, flexible, adaptable, and humble.

In a project that is utilizing Agile, the Product Owner becomes one of the most critical and pivotal roles for a successful project. The Product Owner now takes on what were once duties held by traditionally different roles. While there may still be separation of roles in larger enterprises, an effective Product Owner may sometimes take on a variety of responsibilities below.

• Leads the team in understanding what they need to build
• Creates and prioritizes the product backlog items (PBI)
• Represents the customer/client
• Elaborate on certain ambiguous requirements
• Communicates the product vision
• Participates in meetings
• Inspects the product
• Corrects or changes direction
• Communicate progress to stakeholders

Are you interested in becoming a Product Owner? Check out Scrum Alliance to see how you can become a Certified Scrum Product Owner.