
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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