Product Owner

The Product Owner is one of the 3 accountabilities inside a Scrum Team.

The Product Owner accountability is held by one person. They are accountable for maximising the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is carried out will vary widely in practice.

The Product Owner is accountable for effective Product Backlog management. This includes:

• Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal.
• Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items.
• Ordering Product Backlog items.
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood.

Others may help with all of this, but the Product Owner remains accountable for it.

The Product Owner’s decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog.

The value the Product Owner has helped create is made real and transparent via the Increment.

For Scrum to succeed and value to be delivered efficiently, the organisation must recognise, respect and support the Product Owner.

As an organisation develops trust in the empirical approach that Scrum brings, Product Owners may become like a “mini CEO” for the product. They will be empowered to make tactical, near real-time decisions for the future direction of the product, based on data and insights that emerge from the Scrum Team as they do their work.

Although not prescribed by Scrum specifically, effective Product Owners typically exhibit these characteristics:

• They define and communicate the goal and strategy of the product they wish to build.
• They have a good understanding of customers, users, the business, the market place, the competition and of future trends for the product.
• They are effective communicators and facilitators, with the ability to enable groups of stakeholders to reach decisions, despite limited data or information.
• They are a decision-maker with the ability to say no, or not now, and explain why they have reached a decision.

Being a Product Owner can be tough. If they make the wrong decision, we may build the wrong thing. Significant waste will result. Product Owners need support from the Scrum Team and stakeholders to succeed.

Making information and decisions transparent combined with frequent inspection and adaptation around options and decisions will increase the probability of success.

Although it is somewhat of an oversimplification, it can be helpful to think of the Product Owner as being accountable for the “what”. They have the ultimate decision in the Scrum Team around what Product is developed.