Product Owner – Complete Guide – Types, skills, roles and responsibilities

Product Owner – Complete Guide – Types, skills, roles and responsibilities

Complete Guide

Product owners are at the center of every development cycle. Though a product owner’s role can vary depending on the environment, they typically have several key roles and responsibilities covering everything from business strategy to product design. They are responsible for maximizing the product and business value through continuous backlog management. At the most basic level, an agile product owner, or Scrum product owner, is the leader responsible for maximizing the value of the products created by a scrum development team. The primary goal in a Product Owner role is to represent the customer to the development team. A key activity is to manage and make visible the product backlog, or the prioritized list of requirements for future product development. In fact, the Product Owner is the only person who can change the order of items in the product backlog. One unusual aspect of Product Owner responsibilities is that you must be available to the development team at all times to answer any questions team members have regarding the customer’s view of how they’re implementing a product feature.

 

Product owner is an umbrella term that comprises different types of product owners. Let us have a look at them.

 

Scrum Product Owner: As its name suggests, a product owner in Scrum is in charge of a product. Note that the choice of the name is intentional. The role is not called product administrator, feature broker, product backlog manager, user story writer, or project manager—even though that’s sometimes how it is interpreted. It is also not called “product manager” primarily to indicate the level of empowerment and respect product owners require to succeed in their job. If the product owner owns a product and is responsible for maximising its value, then it is important to understand what a product is. We regard a (digital) product as an asset that creates value for a group of users and for the business. For example, We are writing this article using Microsoft Word. When \we need to take a break from writing, We save the document. Word is the product. But the ability to save the document is a feature, a part of the overall product.

 

Feature Owner and Component Owner: A feature owner is an individual who owns a capability end users can interact with, for instance, the ability to persist a Word document or to edit it. A component owner owns an architecture building block like a user-interface layer or a payment service. Component owners typically require in-depth technical skills. For example, the owner of a persistence service has to be able to describe its interfaces or APIs and converse with the users—the development team members who use the service. Feature and component owners are responsible for maximizing the value their features and components create while ensuring that this does not compromise the product’s overall value creation. This includes describing their functionality, interacting with development teams, participating in product discovery and strategy work, and helping evaluate feedback and data.

 

Platform Owner: A software platform is a collection of digital assets that are used by several products, as I describe in more detail in the article “Leveraging Software Platforms”. A platform owner owns such a platform. The individual is responsible for maximizing the value the platform creates, for example, reducing time-to-market of the products built on top of it or reducing development cost. You can think of a platform owner as a type of product owner: Someone whose product is a platform and who requires in-depth technical expertise to communicate with the users of the product—the members of the development teams who build the products that use the platform.

 

SAFe Product Owner: The agile scaling framework SAFe uses its own product owner role, the SAFe product owner. Despite the similarity of the name, the role significantly differs from the Scrum product owner. Whereas a Scrum product owner owns a product in its entirety, a SAFe product owner looks after the product details, defines user stories, works on a subset of the product backlog, and interacts with the one or more development teams. The SAFe product owner is therefore focused on the product tactics. The strategic product responsibilities are taken on by another role, the SAFe product manager. To put it differently, the SAFe model splits product ownership into two distinct roles: The SAFe product manager owns the strategic product decisions, and the SAFe product owner is in charge of the tactics. This is in stark contrast to the Scrum product owner who exercises full-stack product ownership, from vision to the tactics, as the following picture shows.

 

Portfolio Owner: A portfolio owner looks after a group of products, and the role is also known as product portfolio manager. An example of a product portfolio is Microsoft Office. It consists of products such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The job of a portfolio owner is to maximise the value a product portfolio creates. This includes actively managing the portfolio, collaborating with the product owners who look after the products within the portfolio, harmonising the individual product strategies and product roadmaps, aligning major releases, managing dependencies, and helping create a common user experience across the various products.

 

Skills required to be a product owner

 

Customer Delighter: As a product owner, you're not just an administrator, taking whatever the stakeholder says and adding it to the product backlog. Sure, you have to listen to what your stakeholders want, but you have to do more than process information — you have to discover those latent needs that your customer or user hasn't even imagined.

 

Storyteller: Great product owners go beyond the mechanics of chopping up a user story into the product backlog and sending it to developers. As a product owner, your mission is to think about what will transform that story into a product feature that — you guessed it — delights the user.

 

Delegator: Even though only one person is supposed to be the product owner within the Scrum framework, it's almost impossible for a single person to manage everything alone. If things start slipping through the cracks, you start to see teams creating additional parallel roles. For instance, a team may create a technical product owner role to compensate for product owners who don't see themselves as the team leaders.

 

Developer: It's no mistake to say you're a developer, too. In Scrum, we get hung up on carefully delineating roles. That's helpful for teaching Scrum, but not always as helpful in practice. Roles can become so overstated that the focus moves away from the value being delivered to who does what. As a product owner, you may think, "I own the product backlog. I own the user stories. I give them to the development team, and they develop them." True, but guess what? You are part of a team. You are not just a team leader.

Knowledge Broker: Just as you are a developer, you are also a knowledge broker. Yes, you represent the product backlog and you are the interface between the development team and the stakeholders. But you're not necessarily the definitive expert on the product. So the developers writing the code may not get very far by talking to you to get user story details.

 

Conflict Resolver: If you can't handle conflict, you're in the wrong game. In product development in particular, we're dealing with an inherently conflict-filled situation. This is especially true when people are fighting over resources and politicking, as they will do. So the better you are at resolving conflict, the less you will have to escalate (see below). As a product owner, you have to have the courage and the capability to engage when things get difficult. And know this: you generally have to go through conflict to get to a solution. You'll need to be collaborative to minimize the negative, and you'll need to mediate.

 

Effective Escalator: Inevitably, no matter how good you are at resolving conflicts, you'll need to escalate something up the chain of command. This is not about personal squabbles, like little kids whining to Dad, "He hit me." Escalation is feedback to management that management has deployed conflicting goals. For example, take two stakeholders who have tasked the same team with two different goals that don't fit. That's conflict, plain and simple. The best product owners have a conflict escalation mechanism ready to go. Of course, you'll try to sort things out as best you can with stakeholders, but you'll also have the cultivate the ability to go up the management chain and back down again.

 

Major roles of a Product Owner

 

Product owners are crucial to Agile development since they act as a bridge among various organizational agencies. This person interacts with corporate customers and closely collaborates with team members. Many enroll in Agile courses to precisely understand and grasp the functions. Product owner roles and responsibilities are to keep the company updated about the status of a project. 

 

A Product owner’s role is to ensure that the organization receives the most value possible from the product creation cycle. This basically entails working closely with the production team to ensure all product specifications are clearly stated and carried out on schedule. 

·         The product roadmap must be precisely specified, and each product must be described in detail. 

·         Sort and prioritize the product roadmap appropriately to provide high priority to the most critical steps. 

·         Schedule workpieces and the product roadmap in accordance with the objectives and objectives of the client. 

·         Assess the production team's progress and offer ongoing comments. 

·         Scrum product owner's responsibilities are to make sure that everyone on the team understands the product roadmap. 

·         The team must understand the user requirements and market needs. 

 

Major Responsibilities of a Product Owner

 

Backlog of Products: Product owner main role in agile is managing the product backlog. They are responsible for owning and defining the product roadmap in line with client demands. The owner must first update the backlog list. After this action, the list needs to be properly prioritized based on urgent and important needs. Additionally, the right development path must be well-mapped out. The list of products in the backlog must be constantly updated. The backlog list must also be constantly updated as the requirements for the items change and expand. Every stakeholder must have access to the product backlog because it is dynamic and always changing. 

 

Evolving Phases: Additionally, a product owner task is proactively engaging in the item's advancement. The same has to be regularly reviewed and conveyed to the design team as the customer's goals and strategy evolve. All sessions and calls for cadence and evaluation must include a Product owner. A Product owner should always take the lead and participate in sprint review sessions to point out development areas. 

 

Serving as the Primary Contact Point: The key source of information for all the essential parties is the Product owner, who plays a distinctive position in the organization. They must ensure that management, technical staff, and customers have the necessary buy-in. 

 

Expressing User's Idea: A product owner is responsible for having a distinct understanding of the aims and goals of the client. Every relevant party needs to be informed, which must be specified. It comprises the client, the planning committee, the scrum team, and the relevant management consultants. 

 

Understanding and Predicting Client Needs: A product owner must have sufficient market and business knowledge to understand and anticipate client needs. In addition, a product owner must be aware of the client's needs throughout the trip lifecycle. It will enable them to understand long-term client objectives better and foresee changes and new needs. 

 

Conclusion: At the center of each development process are the product proprietors. So, what is product owner roles and responsibilities? Although a product owner's function may change based on the situation, they normally have several important tasks and responsibilities ranging from corporate strategy to product development. These professionals are in charge of continuously managing the backlog to maximize the product and company value. Depending on client needs, the product owner creates user experiences and ranks them for the design team.

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