The diary of a product owner #4: What is the product owner’s role in Agile?
The product owner (PO) is make-or-break for a digital product. In this series so far, we’ve talked about what meetings PO can attend and how they can be more effective in their job. In this article, we will take a step back and look into what it really means to be a product owner. Read on to find out what responsibilities this title carries and why Boldare’s product owners are people from the client’s side.
Table of contents
The role and stances of a product owner
According to the Scrum Guide, a product owner is, “accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team” (source). Their most important responsibility is to take care of the product backlog - “an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product. It is the single source of work undertaken by the Scrum Team.” According to the Scrum Guide, managing the product backlog includes tasks like:
- “Developing and explicitly communicating the product goal;
- Creating and clearly communicating product backlog items;
- Ordering product backlog items; and,
- Ensuring that the product backlog is transparent, visible and understood.”
The role of product owner in Agile goes beyond managing the product backlog or any other tasks they complete. According to the Scrum Guide, there are six stances that the PO can (and should) take over the course of product development. These stances are
- Visionary,
- Collaborator,
- Customer Representative,
- Decision Maker,
- Influencer,
- Experimenter.
For the product to succeed, the PO needs to take each of these stances on different occasions, for example during pitching the budget to their boss, or during product workshops. To better understand when each stance should be taken, we’ll look at them separately.
See also our previous article: When must the Product Owner participate in the daily scrum?
Visionary
This stance is about shaping the product’s vision and its business goals. The PO does it when working with C-levels and the product’s stakeholders.
The vision and product strategy makes the difference between good and bad product owners: good ones will understand the value of the vision and try to sell it to others, while bad ones will have no interest in it. The latter can be a source of risk to the product’s success.
Collaborator
As a collaborator, the Agile product owner (together with the product strategist) explains their vision in a way that is clear to different stakeholders: developers, salespeople, clients or investors. For example, the ability to clarify the technical aspects of a product to non-developers could be useful when pitching a budget to investors.
Being a collaborator requires good communication skills as the PO should be talking to the clients. These conversations can happen at any point of product development, even as early as creating the vision for the product or building a prototype. Also, the Agile product owner needs to be able to collaborate on different aspects of product strategy, including setting goals, building roadmaps, and creating the definition of done or definition of ready.
Customer Representative
As a customer representative, the Agile product owner should be focused on the product users’ needs and pains. The PO can achieve that in two ways:
- by ensuring that testing is an integral part of product development,
- and by being involved in the validation process of the product vision.
Introducing a new feature should always be preceded by finding out if the feature responds to user needs. Failing to do so will result in spending money on a feature that no one will use.
Decision Maker
There are multiple deadlines associated with developing a digital product. They can be related to marketing, legal, or market conditions, but in every case, it’s the PO’s responsibility to meet them. That is why, in Scrum, the Agile product owner is the source of all decisions and has the final say on what goes in or out of the product backlog.
Influencer
Sometimes, the PO’s ideas and decisions are challenged by other stakeholders. In that case, it’s product owner’s role to act as an influencer and use their broad view of the product vision to convince others. It’s a helpful skill whether pitching a budget to a CEO, or trying to explain why the product needs an additional team.
Experimenter
Experiments are critical to the development of successful digital products. To be an experimenter, the Agile PO needs to constantly work with assumptions and hypotheses. Tech giants like Google or Amazon carry out thousands of experiments before they release a single product, and every good PO should do the same.
Recently, a client wanted to figure out why one of the features in their product was heavily underused. It was a product aimed at helping businesses with their recruitment needs. However, it seemed that only job posters - not job seekers - were using it.
The PO needed to find out the reason for this and Boldare’s team wanted to help. Our product designer organized a brainstorming session where she mapped all the questions that the PO could ask. That became the base for a script which was used to interview clients and find the source of the problem. This shows that even if being an experimenter lies on the PO’s shoulders, they don’t have to do it alone.
Responsibilities of product owners at Boldare
At Boldare, product owners come from the client’s side. We believe that integrating the clients’ culture with ours improves the decision-making process. After all, it’s the client’s business that will be affected most by the success or failure of the product.
We build our products in the Scrum framework which includes a few critical meetings (aka Scrum events). To be successful, product owners are expected to attend and participate in these. Also, they are responsible for:
- managing the product backlog,
- working with the definition of done,
- working with refinement,
- product reviews,
- working with product metrics,
- working with a roadmap,
- working upstream.
The list of responsibilities seems long, but the PO doesn’t have to have experience in working in Scrum or do everything alone - they can always count on their team and product strategist. Being a product owner at Boldare should be treated like a full-time job and Boldare’s Scrum team should be colleagues that the PO works with.
What is the product owner’s role in Agile? - an afterword
The product owner in Agile needs to wear many hats and from the outside it might seem like this role requires decades of experience. In reality, a good PO only needs a vision for the product, and an ability to listen and communicate well. The skills and experience will come in time - with help from the product team.
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