The role of the Product Owner is one of the most hotly debated roles in product development. Since this is a role that is not very well understood; it can be seen in very different ways from person to person, team to team and company to company because of its complexity. You can take a look here for a better understanding of the 5 most common patterns of product ownership: The Scribe, The Proxy, The Business Representative, The Sponsor, and The Entrepreneur.
What is a Product Owner?
The Scrum Guide describes the Product Owner role as being:
“Responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team.”
What exactly does a Product Owner do?
- Defining goals and creating a vision for development projects
- Managing the product backlog
- Prioritizing needs
- Overseeing development stages
- Anticipating client needs
- Acting as primary communicator and link between stakeholders and teams
- Evaluating product progress at each iteration
What’s the pathway to becoming a Product Owner?
There are two main ways of becoming a Product Owner:
- Being promoted from the development team
- Business people taking over the responsibilities of Product Ownership
Why POs can make or break your business?
As previously said — the role is misunderstood and implemented differently from company to company.
One of the simplest ways to start an agile journey is to choose a PO from the development team — this gets you going fast but has two major flaws:
- not choosing an owner of the product but mostly someone that is a translation belt between business and the development team
- betting on someone that is probably highly motivated to do the role but needs to learn it as well as learn the business
Therefore, this choice comes with serious problems — mostly problems of flow and also of not creating the expected business value. The fix of these problems is in many cases getting a PO that has experience in the role. But this rarely creates significant improvements; the new PO might have the skills but will lack business understanding and ownership to take decisions about how to best create business value.
So in addition to the skills, the understandings, the mindsets & the experience that a Product Owner must have to make your business successful — the fact that the PO makes or breaks your business it’s also about how the company understands and empowers this role.
For your Agile project to succeed, not only do you need strong commitment and involvement from the business but you need a damn good Product Owner.
Here at Upstack, we want to work with the best people in the world. If you are a Product Owner who fits this description or a company looking for the top 1% freelancers in development — contact us!
