Agile Webspace > Accountabilities > Product Owner
The Product Owner
The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the developers. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.
At Skyline, the Product Owner (PO) builds bridges between the developers working on the project and the internal and external stakeholders. POs are accountable for optimizing the value created by the development teams. They maintain close communication lines with end users, understand the product vision and can deliver that vision to the developers.
"The Product Owner makes sure the developers build the right thing; the developers build the thing right."
The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes:
- Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal,
- Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items,
- Ordering Product Backlog items, and
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible, and understood.
The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.
For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions. These decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review.
The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the needs of many stakeholders in the Product Backlog. Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince the Product Owner.
Source: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
accountabilities:
- Prevent being the bridge (bottleneck) between stakeholders and the squad.
- Instead build bridges between the stakeholders and the squad.
- Have a vision of what should be built and be able to convey the vision, strategy, and roadmap to the team.
- Collaborate with other Product Owners across chapters, tribes, and squads.
- Work closely together with key stakeholders throughout the development life cycle.
- Translate the desires of the users to the rest of the team.
- Have a solid understanding of DataMiner, the market, the customer, the users, and the business, in order to make sound decisions in cooperation with the squad.
- Work with the input of end users to review priorities regularly and adjust development accordingly.
- Dare to say "no" if it helps to keep the team focused on delivering value.
- Keep commitments towards budget and time frame into account when prioritizing.
- Decide when the potentially releasable increment should be released.
- Does not make the effort estimations.
- Does not create the Sprint Backlog. This is created by the developers based on the top items of the Product Backlog.
- Present objectives and challenges to the squad but refrain from dictating "how" these should be handled—the "how" is the responsibility of the developers and no one else.
- …
empowered:
- The sole owner of the Product Backlog.
- Empowered by the whole company, from all levels, to make decisions that affect the squad's Product Backlog.