10 Duties of A Product Owner
Who is a Product Owner?
The Product Owner is like the operations manager of a product who oversees the day-to-day of a product. In most cases the product owner basically drives the product roadmap they co-designed with the product manager. Product Owners act as the primary contact between the scrum teams, products departments, and stakeholders. Below are 10 outstanding duties or responsibilities of an effective product manager.
1. Communicate Product Vision
As a product owner, one of your duties is ensuring that the people you work with especially the scrum team are clear on the vision of the product you own. The product vision primarily are defined by the Product Manager unless in cases where the Product Owner doubles in as a Product Manager. However whether the Product Owner defines it or not, it is the duty of the Product Owner to ensure that those working on the product understand where the product is headed. This helps in keeping the team motivated even as they work on features that will drive the product vision.
2. Requirement Gathering
The Product Owner works with other stakeholders to understand and document feature requirements. It is the duty of the product owner to go source for all information needed in accomplishing a feature. In cases where you need a UI design for a feature for instance, this documented requirement will aid the designer in understanding what needs to be achieved in order to put out a design that meets the requirement. Stakeholders here can be cross-functional across teams. Product Owners are champions in setting up meetings and driving them to get their jobs done.
3. Driving the Product Roadmap
As a Product Owner one of your responsibilities is making sure that the product roadmap is executed as planned. You can achieve this by ensuring that the items you prioritize for execution are items of value contained in the Roadmap. You should not introduce items not in the roadmap unless of course it was discussed, prioritized, and keyed into the product roadmap.
I am an ardent supporter of the quarterly product roadmap, even though you have your yearly product roadmap, the quarterly roadmap helps you track against a few goals that can easily be noticed if anything starts going sideways. So I will advise you to always plan per quarter and stick to it. If anything changes, deprioritize and reprioritize but at all times, keep it simple and SMART. Also ensure to communicate should anything change on the roadmap to better manage the expectations of those who have an interest in your product.
4. Schedule Releases
Just as you plan on roadmap feature execution, you should also plan for how you plan to release these features. Some Product Owners prefer a defined cadence like once a month, while others prefer the readiness of certain features or a number of features. You can discuss this with your development team, agree on what works best, and get management approval.
Ensure that the release note is ready per release and review it with your product marketing or marketing manager before the release.
5. Develop User Stories
One of your duties as a Product Owner is to write high-quality and acceptable user stories. A user story defines a software function and Acceptable user stories have three major parts, As a … I want to … so that… The first part describes the persona, the second part describes what feature they want and the third and last part describes the benefit they want to derive from the feature. For instance,
As a user of ABC e-commerce website, I want to be able to add multiple products to my cart so that I can pay for them at once when I check out.
When writing your user stories ensure that they meet the Bill Wake INVEST criteria.
INVEST stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. More details about User stories in my coming posts.
6. Backlog Grooming and Prioritising
As a Product Owner, you own the product backlog. Ensure that your backlog is always groomed and prioritized with the feature with the highest priority on top of the backlog. Backlog grooming is always done with your development team. It is usually a weekly cadence meeting that can last 1-2 hours. Here you discuss your user stories, define acceptance criteria, and have the development team agree that the story is ready. When a story is ready, it means the story can be a candidate for a sprint, meaning that the team understands the requirement and have no blocker in getting it done.
7. Collaborating and Communicating with Stakeholders
As a Product Owners you work with virtually all departments of the organization in getting your job done. Product Owners work with Sales to educate them on product features and releases, with the Customer Success team, support and get feedback from them since they interface more with customers. They work with the support team and render support where needed to solve their problems. Product owners also work with the marketing team in their go-to-market plan, work with finance for product budget, with legal on intending product features to ensure they do not violate any government policy. Even with copywriters on the product materials and content. One thing that can stand you out as a product owner is making sure that all your stakeholders are duly informed on what is going on with your product at all times. You can never over-communicate as a product owner.
Ensure to set up defined cadence meetings with each team. Always solicit their feedback as this will help you in planning future features for your product.
As a product owner, you should collaborate with prospective users and clients to understand and anticipate their needs and translate them into product requirements
8. Monitor Progress
It is your duty as a Product Owner to monitor the progress of the scrum team in the development of your product features. You should be available during sprint reviews and be able to tell how far they have gone with feature implementation. This goes a long way with you knowing when things start going wrong. Ensure to remove blockers for the team to excel and report progress to all stakeholders.
9. Test Product Features
As a Product Owner you should ensure to test and accept completed stories before closing a sprint. That way you can re-open any story that does not meet the defined requirement. It is your duty as a product owner to validate product features. Only accept stories that meet defined requirement and reject those that does not meet defined requirement for a rework.
10. Reports
As a product owner, one of your duties is sending out
- Sprint report at the end of every sprint
- Roadmap progress report possibly monthly
- Release note to your product users
What do you think about the above list, let me hear your feedback.
