The Product Owner is 1 of 3 roles in Scrum. They are most commonly known for writing user stories and maintaining the backlog, but a lot goes into doing these tasks well. This week’s 1-pager gives a zoomed-out overview.
Are you a budding Product Owner? Check out our compilation "Skills for Successful Product Owners"
Content of 1-Pager:
The Role of the Product Owner
Product Owners are crucial for product success as they decide what to build and what not to build. These decisions are based on constant dialogue with stake holders and dev team. The PO is the sole person managing the Product Backlog and ordering it to maximize value. They make sure the Backlog is visible and understood. For the PO to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. The PO is the champion of the product and needs to have a strong product vision.
The PO is in constant dialoge with stakeholders and dev team. The PO elicits requirements and facilitates. Stakeholders have requirements and feature requests. The PO or BAs or stakeholders make an educated guess about the business value of each proposed feature. The dev team makes an educated guess (aka estimate) about the time / cost / effort and technical feasibilty of the requests.
With all the information the PO picks with features to really build and which to discard (involves saying “No” a lot). The selected features get into the backlog which is maintained and order by the PO.
Sources:
- Henrik Kniberg excellent “Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell” video (and the finished image)
- Scrum Guide
