Agile Product Owner Course — Part 1
What is a Product Owner?
A simple guide to understanding the role and responsibilities
Numerous times, I have been asked these questions: “What exactly is a PO?” and “What does a PO do exactly?” My aspiration in writing this article is to demystify the role and responsibilities of a Product Owner.
At the end of this article, you should be able to have a clear understanding of
- What is a Product Owner?
- What are the responsibilities of a PO?
- What are the attributes of an effective PO?
What is a Product Owner?
Product Owner is a reasonably new title given to individuals who lead an agile development team and is responsible for maximizing the product’s value resulting from the team’s work. Let’s break that down.
Lead an agile development team
- Product Owner originates from Scrum, an agile framework for building and sustaining complex products. As such, you will generally find PO roles in organizations that adopt Scrum.
- The PO is the leader of the agile development team comprising designers, engineers, architects, and analysts.
- While the PO sets the overall product vision and direction, the others play a significant role in the execution and delivery.
Maximizing the product’s value resulting from the team‘s work
- As the name implies, the PO is ultimately responsible for the development and the team delivering it.
- The agile development team has a fixed cost (also known as burn rate).
- The PO must prioritize and ensure that the team only works on product features that deliver the most value.
- As a rule of thumb, the value generated must far exceed the burn rate.
What are the responsibilities of a PO?
- Own the product vision
The vision should describe the essence of your product: what are the problems it is solving, for whom, and why is it important? - Own the product roadmap
The roadmap is a high-level strategic document outlining the product’s vision, direction, priorities, and how the product will evolve. - Own the product backlog
The backlog is a prioritized list of features (written in the form of user stories) that the PO would like to explore. The agile development team will pick up the highest priority features in each sprint. - Write user stories
User stories are product requirements written from a customer/end-user perspective. User stories articulate how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer. - Be part of the agile team’s meetings.
The PO must make himself available to be part of the team’s meetings: sprint planning, daily stand-up, backlog grooming, and sprint review. These meetings are essential for the PO to share the highest priority stories for development, clarify assumptions, test the product, and offer feedback. - Prioritize the team’s development to maximize value
The PO must be able to prioritize the demands based on impact and effort. The goal of the PO is to ensure the value created by the team is several multiples of the cost and strategically aligned to the product vision.
What are the attributes of an effective PO?
The role entails many responsibilities. A simple way to remember them is using the acronym “LEAD.”
- Leadership
- Empathy
- Accountability
- Decisiveness
Must possess leadership.
A PO needs to lead the team effectively and confidently sell the product vision and the team’s mission & purpose.
- What is the product vision?
- What problems are we trying to solve?
- What type of outcome and business impact are we striving to achieve?
- Why do we exist, and why is our work important?
The team needs to both be aspired and motivated by what they are building and the lasting change (impact) it would have on the customer, business, society, or world
It is a common misconception that the PO needs to be the highest ranked individual in the team. While this may be true in most organizations — since the PO decisions will often impact the company’s profit & loss — it is not always the case; certain team members may outrank the PO.
In practice, ranks should not and do not matter; it is crucial to understand that everyone has a role to play within the team. The job of a PO is to define what to build and why it is important, while engineers focus on how to build it right. The key to success is servant leadership and active cross-functional collaboration.
Engineers have an equal say in terms of how to build the product to achieve sustainability, scalability, security, and resilience among others
Must possess empathy.
The word empathy encompasses both customer empathy and empathy for the development team.
Empathy for Customer
To the team, the PO represents the voice of the customer. Successful POs can put themselves into the shoes of their customers and be able to articulate what pain points and emotional needs the team is attempting to solve.
Empathy for Team
Being part of the team means dealing with individuals’ emotions, stress, and morale. Please do not underestimate the destructiveness of unaddressed negativity brewing within the group, as it will impact productivity, and quality and, in the worst-case scenario, lead to staff attrition.
The PO must take every opportunity to ensure everyone is happy and energized. To that end, the PO should invest in team-building activities, invest in 1-on-1 time with individual team members, celebrate the team’s achievements, and control the number of work-in-progress items at any time.
In my experience dealing with engineers, it is also vital for the PO to invest both budget & time for the team to correct previously accumulated technical debt — no right-minded engineer would want to work for a product that is highly unstable, insecure, and unsustainable. Failing to do so might result in unhappiness and, ultimately, staff attrition
Must be accountable.
The PO is ultimately accountable for the product or feature(s) the team builds, its commercial success, and ongoing maintenance and improvements throughout the entire product lifecycle.
Accountable for product-market fit
The PO needs to decide whether the product in question is worth the investment — this includes but is not limited to performing market research, competitive analysis, user studies & prototyping to determine product-market fit.
Even though extensive research and studies can mitigate some risk, there will always be a residual risk that the product/feature in question may fall short of expectations (e.g., due to changing external factors)
In such cases, rather than launching the complete product, an experienced PO may elect for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach to minimize cost and validate the product desirability
Accountable for maximizing value
The goal of launching any new product or feature is to generate value. Value can be revenue generation, cost savings, cost avoidance, exceptional customer experience, and regulatory compliance.
The PO needs to work closely with business stakeholders to identify and forecast the potential value that can be extracted and weigh it against the cost of implementation and against other projects to determine if the project is worth undertaking.
After launching the product, the PO needs to measure and optimize for value generation constantly. To that end, the PO needs to work with product marketing to run campaigns to drive awareness and usage; and data analysts to derive insights for potential product improvements.
In certain organizations, you may encounter both Product Managers (“PM”) as well as Product Owners. In those situations, the PM will play a more strategic role while the PO is more tactical and works with development team on execution and delivery. The overall value however, should be co-owned by both the PM and PO.
Accountable for user trust & regulatory compliance
Where applicable, the PO must ensure the relevant subject matter experts are engaged: cybersecurity, data protection, legal, and regulatory, to ensure the product fully complies with local laws and safeguards the interest of both the company and customer.
Misplaced trust and not adhering to laws can result in both irrevocable brand reputation damages and hefty monetary penalties resulting from litigations by customers or/and regulators
Accountable for customer support
The PO needs to consider all customer touchpoints when designing a customer journey. Each touch point must be ready to service the customer (e.g., brief contact center team on an upcoming product launch and how to respond to customer inquires)
Forecasting the volume to each touch point is vital to ensure sufficient capacity to serve demands and minimize wait time.
Must be decisiveness.
POs need to be willing to make tough decisions. They need to be analytical and possess situational awareness — experienced POs know how much time is left to gather the data required to make an informed decision.
Everyone makes mistakes. Similarly, POs are not immune and do make mistakes resulting in substantial financial losses. The more experienced POs, however, know how to track and mitigate such risks actively
POs do not need to know everything. A key hallmark of an experienced PO is his ability to quickly access and leverage subject matter experts within the cross-functional team, knowledge, and recommendations to make an informed decision or to find an innovative solution.
POs need to feel comfortable consulting with engineers and UX/UI designers on specific challenges; and vice-versa.
Summary
- POs lead an agile development team to maximize the product’s value resulting from the team’s work.
- POs own the product, vision, roadmap, and backlog.
- POs must write user stories and make themselves available for team meetings as Scrum requires.
- POs must possess leadership skills to inspire and motivate’s team. To that end, the PO must be able to sell the product vision, roadmap, and the team’s mission and purpose.
- POs must exhibit empathy and possess relevant people skills to resolve team dynamic issues and conflicts. POs are also customer obsessive and represent the voice of the customer to the team.
- POs are accountable for the product’s entire lifecycle, from ideation to proof-of-concept, to launch, and finally, retirement. To that end, the PO needs to ensure the product generates value beyond its cost and safeguards customers’ interest & safety.
- POs need to be decisive and willing to make decisions. They need to be able to collaborate and leverage the skills & knowledge of others to find innovative solutions to problems.
