The role of product owner in scrum development is crucial, and can make or break a scrum team. Product owners must be heavily involved in the process of working with their scrum team to help create a quality product that both the product owner's company and end user will want.
A product owner’s main responsibilities include:
A product owner’s main responsibilities include:
“Defining the features of a project and content, responsible for the profitability of the product, prioritizing features according to market value, can change features or priority, and accept or reject work results”(Sutherland, 2006)
The product owner must work with the scrum team to develop a product backlog by communicating with the company and end user. Communication is key in providing what features the company needs in the product, as well as the features that the end user will need or want. The product owner needs to be “the voice of the customer in a scrum team...and knows what the customer wants the product under development to do”(Agile for Dummies, 2010). This means that the product owner needs to be in communication with end users and other members of the company constantly, so that they can understand overall what functionality and content is needed in the product. The product owner must relay this information to the scrum team, so that the team can understand what it is they are developing and who they are developing for.
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“In order to prioritize the Product Backlog, the Product Owner needs help from the Scrum Team to estimate the cost of developing features.”(Sutherland , 2006). Every function of the product should have a priority, and it is up to the product owner to help the scrum team in deciding what the priority of the functions should be. By communicating with the scrum team to help them to set the priority of each function, it makes it easier for the team to know what needs to be done first and what is most important for the project overall. The product owner must always be up to date on what is needed in the product, and must convey to the scrum team any changes in the set priority of the product functions. Without this communication, the team may put more work than necessary in a low priority function or the opposite.
The product owner needs to be constantly ensuring that what the scrum team is developing will be acceptable. Product owners should be watching the product build from the ground up, constantly seeing what the scrum team is planning and has done so far. By communicating with the scrum team, product owners can check to make sure that what is delivered from sprint to sprint is acceptable or not. If the work is acceptable the team can move on to other deliverables, otherwise they would be able to work on fixing what was not acceptable with what was delivered.
Overall, the key to being a productive and efficient product owner is to COMMUNICATION.
