Product owner is one of the most important roles in any agile teams. Sometimes this role is also called BPO referring to Business Product Owner. Product owner is one of the three key roles of the agile team (namely Product Owner, Scrum Master & The Team) and is a someone tasked with creating vision for the product and governing what is being released.
Here are some of the key roles a product owner typically does in an agile team.
- Defines the features of the product being developed by conveying or creating the vision and goals
- Creates and maintains the product backlog
- Prioritizes the features according business or market values so that they are analyzed, developed and tested according to those priorities
- Helps the team if any clarifications are required around the features /epics or stories.
- Is responsible for the profitability of the product.
- Is responsible for making any adjustment to the features being developed for the priority of the development every iteration as needed.
- Participates in the various key meetings such as Daily Scrums, Retrospectives, and probably explains the business values to the stakeholders when a Show and Tell meeting is conducted.
- Makes decision on acceptance or rejection of the work results
- Represents the customer and engages the customers or interfaces with them as required.
- Is responsible for communicates the project status to external stakeholders
- Has authority to terminate the iteration or sprint if a sudden change in direction is required.
On the fun side, also take a look at the following two great cartoons about product owner roles. (Disclaimer: The images have been borrowed under fair usage. The original author name(s) appear on the cartoon itself)
First one:
An the other one:
Originally posted 2012-09-16 13:17:01.
