Scrum Roles: The Product Owner
The Product Owner bridges the gap between the customer, business stakeholders, and the development team.
- An expert on the product and the customer’s needs and priorities
- Can help to clarify project requirements.
- Make the decisions about what the product does and does not include. The responsibility of deciding what to release and when.
- Creates and maintains the Product Backlog.
Seven skills needed to be a great Product Owner
Customer Delighter
A great Product Owner will domore than just take what the customer(s) says and add it to the Product Backlog, there is a need to delight the customer(s) by delivering latent customer needs in ways that they never expected.
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 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 products owners who don’t see themselves as the team leaders.
To thrive, a grea Product Owner needs to delegate and ideally build an informal team that will help – this does not appear to be Scrum like, but such a team team could include the ScrumMaster and various members of the product development team.
Developer
A Product Owner 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 a great Product Owner is also part of a team.
Knowledge broker
Just as a Product Owner is a developer, they are also a knowledge broker. They represent the product backlog and are the interface between the development team and the stakeholders. So, while the Product Owner may not be the definitive expert on the product they do need to enable collaboration between the Development Team and the subject matter experts (SMEs).
Conflict resolver
A product owner, you have to have the courage and the capability to engage when things get difficult. Generally have all Product Owners have to go through conflict to get to a solution. They need to be collaborative to minimize the negative, and to be good mediator.
Effective escalator
The best Product Owners have a conflict escalation mechanism ready to go. Theynwill alwas try to sort things out as best they can with stakeholders, but they will cultivate the ability to go up the management chain and back down again.
A Product Owner will need more than just these seven, but these are a good starting place.