Product Owner
Summary #
At the most basic level, an Agile product owner, or Scrum product owner, is accountable for representing the customer to a Scrum or Agile team and maximizing the value of the products created by a Scrum team.
Responsibilities #
Managing and prioritizing the product backlog #
We list this first not because it’s necessarily the most critical product owners’ task, but because it is typically where they’ll spend a lot of their time.
The product backlog is an essential document for agile organizations because it captures and prioritizes the development team’s user stories to work on in upcoming sprints.
But whether or not an organization follows the agile sprint framework, its product owners will spend much of their time and focus reviewing the backlog of development tasks and prioritizing what the developers should take on next. This helps make sure that the team executes according to the product management team’s strategic goals and priorities.
Translating Product Manager s’ strategies to tasks for development #
- When we stated above that product owners manage the backlog, we did not mean they simply moved existing user stories and other task-level details around the backlog.
- Product owners must be more proactive than that. In many cases, they are responsible for drafting (or at least refining) these stories into tasks that the development team can execute on.
- Here is how Selina M., a product owner for Quest Software, describes her role: “Product owners take initiatives from the product manager, break them down into stories or actionable chunks of value, and work with the engineering team to implement them.”
Learning the market and customers’ needs #
To be useful in translating their company’s strategic plan into the right execution steps, product owners must understand their market and customer needs.
This often involves working with Product Manager to learn about what problems they are aiming to solve with the product, what customer needs or desires have informed their product strategy, and what the team will view as product success.
Gaining this high-level knowledge of the market, customer persona, and product strategy helps product owners more effectively perform several of their day-to-day tactical functions, including:
- Breaking product management’s epics into user stories
- Arranging and prioritizing sprints
- Evaluating progress at each stage of development
- Answering dev questions about the reasoning for user stories or tasks
Serving as a liaison between Product Manager and development #
Product managers set the big-picture goals and strategy for their product’s success. The engineering or development teams build the physical (or digital) product. But between these two ends of the product development spectrum, there is a lot of room for interpretation—and misinterpretation.
Product owners act as a bridge to connect the product and development teams. They translate their understanding of the product manager’s vision and what each product’s area is designed to do for its users. This enables them to explain to the dev team the how and the why behind all user stories and other tasks they’re prioritizing.
Staying accessible to development to answer questions #
When they’re working stories and other tasks during a sprint, the development team might be unclear about a particular job assigned to them. They might not understand, for example, why a user story calls to design the product functionality in a particular way. They might also believe they have a faster, more efficient way to build the functionality but aren’t sure if doing so could undermine product management’s strategic goal in some way.
In these instances, the development team should ask the product owner for answers and guidance. Because the company’s development sprints are time-boxed—usually two weeks, or a month at the longest—the team will need these answers quickly.
For these reasons, the product owner should be accessible to the development team and prepare to respond to their questions immediately.
Product Manager vs Product Owner #
| Product Manager | Product Owner | |
|---|---|---|
| This role is all about the big picture for a product with the whole long-term project in mind. | A role that looks at the smaller details rather than the big picture. Short-term focus. | |
| The vision of the product. | Making product vision into an actionable backlog. | |
| Customer understanding. | Advocate for the customer’s needs. | |
| Prioritize features. | Highlight needs for the development of a team. | |
| Product Roadmap | Backlog, epics, and User Stories. | |
| Works with outside stakeholders | Works with internal stakeholders | |
| Helps to define the product vision | Helps teams execute on a shared vision | |
| Outlines what success looks like | Outlines the plan for achieving success | |
| Owns vision, marketing, ROI | Owns team backlog and fulfillment work | |
| Works at a conceptual level | Involved in day-to-day activities |
This division is preferable but responsibilities can shift a bit when team makeups and practices shift. #
But responsibilities can shift a bit when team makeups and practices shift. For instance, if the team isn’t doing Scrum (say, they’re doing Kanban or something else), the product manager might end up doing the prioritization for the development team and play a larger role in making sure everyone is on the same page. On the other hand, if the team is doing Scrum, but doesn’t have a product manager, then the product owner often ends up taking on some of the product manager’s responsibilities.
All of this can get really murky really quickly, which is why teams have to be careful to clearly define responsibilities, or
they can risk falling into the old ways of building software, where one group writes the requirements and throws it over the fence for another group to build.When this happens
expectations get misaligned, time gets wasted, and teams run the risk of creating products or features that don’t satisfy customer needs.