Product Owner

Returning value to the organisation

The Product Owner is primarily responsible for the value delivered to the organisation, she does this by focusing on 4 specific areas of the asset/project.

• Owning and communicating the product vision
• Managing the Product Backlog
• Stakeholder communications
• Single source of domain knowledge for the delivery team

Owning and communicating the product vision

The Product Owner is the key stakeholder who defines the Product Vision and communicates it to the team to ensure they fully understand the overall direction and not just the requirements.

The "Product Vision" is also communicated to all other stakeholders outside the team to ensure organisation wide understanding of the direction in which the Product Owner is taking the product.

Whilst the Product Vision will involve a great deal of collaboration and negotiation with all areas of the organisation, it is the Product Owner who has the final say

Managing the Product Backlog

The Product Owner is the person solely responsible for the detail and prioritisation of items in the product backlog.  By ensuring the highest value items are at the top of the backlog and that the level of detail in the Acceptance Criteria of each item is sufficient to allow the team to deliver a correct and complete solution for each item, the Product Owner ensures that ROI is maximised.

Stakeholder communications

Whilst there are many channels of communications in a Scrum Team, the Product Owner leads the outward facing Stakeholder Communications with those outside the team.

Single source of domain knowledge for the delivery team

Regardless of who in the organisation has the specific domain knowledge to answer a question that arises within the Delivery Team, the Product Owner is the single point of contact for the team.

Questions that require expertise from other stakeholders are resolved for the team by the Product Owner.