Roles and Responsibilities: Product Owner
This blog will help you understand the roles and responsibilities of a Product Owner. But before we deep dive into the roles and responsibilities, it would be great to have a quick overview of who actually a Product Owner is.
Who is a Product Owner?
The Product Owner (PO) is the Agile team member primarily responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the team by ensuring that the team backlog is aligned with customer and stakeholder needs. As a member of the extended Product Management function, the PO is the team’s primary customer advocate and primary link to business and technology strategy. This enables the team to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders while continuously evolving the Solution.
Each PO represents the needs of customers and the business within a particular Solution domain, typically co-represented by a Product Manager. Together, they ensure that product strategy and implementation remain connected throughout the value stream. Serving as the ‘voice of the customer’ for the team entails a broad range of responsibilities. The PO must build and manage key relationships, synthesize information from multiple sources, maintain business alignment in the Team Backlog, and communicate effectively with various audiences—all with a bias toward delivering and learning quickly.
Roles and Responsibilities of the Product Owner
The PO’s responsibilities can generally be categorized into five primary areas, as shown in the following figure.
First Responsibility: Connecting with the Customer
The first responsibility can be further explained with the following sub-set responsibilities.
1. Know the Customers
Value is determined by the customer; therefore, the PO is keenly aware of the needs of the people to whom their products are delivered. Customers may be internal or external to the enterprise and may have direct or indirect relationships with the PO. Whether they consume products, services, systems, APIs, platforms, or other solutions, customers’ wants, needs, and preferences are continually explored by the PO.
2. Know the Stakeholders
Product design and implementation must also reflect the needs of non-customer stakeholders. Business Owners, Lean Portfolio Management, Product Management, System Architects, and fellow POs, for example, rely on the cadence and quality of the team’s output. The PO identifies key stakeholders and balances their needs with those of the customer.
3. Identify the Problem we are solving
Good products solve specific problems. What’s more, they solve specific problems that are worth solving. Identifying problems that customers want to be solved is the first element of design thinking. In this context, the PO discovers a range of customer needs through divergent thinking tools, then identifies the ‘jobs to be done’ that are most worth pursuing.
4. Develop whole product solutions
Solutions that address a range of customer needs are more valuable than those that target a single need. POs aim to deliver whole-product solutions by understanding the desired customer experience, guiding the development of candidate designs through the Lean UX process, and delivering tested concepts that maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Second Responsibility: Contributing to Vision and Roadmap
1. Understand Market Forces
Market rhythms, market events, sudden opportunities, competitive threats, and changing regulations significantly influence product strategy. POs regularly engage with Product Management to analyze market research and understand the business drivers that trigger Feature requests
2. Represent the end user
Through frequent interviews, gemba, and reporting, POs are strongly connected to the needs and experiences of their products’ end users. Objective insights about how end-users interact with solutions and the features they desire most ensure that the vision and roadmap contain real value.
3. Assist with ART backlog prioritization
In collaboration with Product Management, System Architects, Release Train Engineers (RTEs), and other stakeholders, POs guide the sequencing of features over time toward the best economic outcomes. Through their understanding of which problems need to be solved, which solutions would best solve them, and the feasibility of delivering those solutions, POs help ensure that the vision and roadmap are reflected in the ART Backlog.
4. Educate the ART during PI Planning
The Vision and Roadmap are living artifacts created and adjusted in alignment with business and technical strategy, but a portion of them is always in scope for implementation. The PO assists with communicating the vision and roadmap during PI Planning to ensure teams are aligned and ready to execute against them.
Third Responsibility: Managing and prioritizing the Team Backlog
1. Guide story creation
While any team member can write stories at any time, it is the PO’s responsibility to ensure that they are well-formed and aligned with product strategy. The PO clarifies story details, applies user-story voice, ensures ‘INVEST’ characteristics are present, assists with story splitting, defines enablers, and incorporates behavior-driven design (BDD) to ensure stories support continuous value flow. The PO also allows space for ‘local’ stories and spikes that advance product design but are not derived explicitly from ART-level features.
2. Prioritize backlog items
Achieving continuous value flow requires that the highest-value backlog items are delivered in the shortest sustainable lead time and in the right sequence. The PO enables this by regularly ordering backlog items according to their cost of delay and communicating that sequence to the team during backlog refinement and Iteration Planning.
3. Accept Stories
The PO works with the team to agree on accepted story completion. This includes validating that the story meets acceptance criteria, that it has the appropriate, persistent acceptance tests, and that it otherwise complies with its Definition of Done (DoD). In so doing, the PO assures that quality is built in.
4. Support architectural runway
POs do not typically drive technological decisions, but they make space in the backlog to support the implementation of Architectural Runway. They collaborate with System Architects to craft enablers and work with stakeholders to establish appropriate capacity allocations.
Fourth Responsibility: Supporting the Team in delivering Value
1. Balance stakeholder perspectives
POs constantly receive input, feedback, and insights from customers, stakeholders, teams, and tools that can impact solution development. This information can validate, invalidate, or challenge implementation decisions unexpectedly. Moreover, these sources often conflict with one another. PO needs to ensure that they balance those to attain favorable outcomes keeping in mind the following
- Customer Centricity
- Capacity Allocations
- Cost of Delay
2. Elaborate Stories
Stories are typically created before iteration execution but require ongoing elaboration during implementation. POs address the following by
- Resolving questions
- Managing dependencies
- Communicate emerging priorities
This information also helps the team slice stories effectively to achieve increased velocity and shortened learning cycles.
3. Foster Built-in Quality
The PO is responsible to ensure that all the work complies with built-in quality standards. That means the stories meet
- Scalable definition of done
- Non-functional requirements are taken care of
POs are also cognizant of ad-hoc quality issues and help correct them in or near real time.
4. Participate in Team and ART events
As a member of the Agile team, the PO, naturally, attends and actively participates in team events during PI execution. During iteration planning, backlog refinement, iteration reviews, team retrospectives, and team syncs, the PO provides crucial feedback on the team’s work from an outside-in, customer-centric point of view. By participating in PO Sync and System Demos, the PO helps the team satisfy dependencies, demonstrate incremental value, and maintain cadence with the ART
Fifth Responsibility: Getting and Applying Feedback
1. Test Benefit Hypothesis
PO collaborates with Product Management to define benefit hypotheses based on their evolved understanding of customer and market knowledge. These hypotheses drive implementation and are validated (or invalidated) by feedback they gather from customers and stakeholders throughout the product life cycle.
2. Obtain feedback from customers and stakeholders
The PO gathers this feedback directly via empathy interviews, Gemba walks, iteration reviews, and system demos and indirectly via application telemetry, usage analytics, financial reporting, and secondary market data.
3. Share feedback with the ART
The feedback collected by the PO is valuable to the whole ART. The PO shares this information with Product Management and System Architects as part of Continuous Exploration, with other POs during PO Sync, with their teams during backlog refinement, iteration planning, and iteration reviews, and with the ART during PI planning, system demos and, if applicable, Inspect and Adapt events
4. Evolve solution design
The overarching purpose that a PO carries is continuous value delivery and relentless improvement. PO addresses that through frequent feedback cycles during product development. This helps in refining and evolving the product vision, roadmap, strategy and design which in turn helps in optimizing the solution design.
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