The Product Owner Role A Stakeholder Proxy for Agile Teams
Essays on role models
The Product Owner Role: A Stakeholder Proxy for Agile Teams
The primary goal of a product owner is to represent the needs and desires of the stakeholder community to an agile delivery team, being the first source of information about the problem domain for the team. Each agile team, or in the case of large programmes an agile subteam, has a single product owner to go to for information and prioritization of their work and they do so right away. A secondary goal for a product owner is to represent the work of the agile team to the stakeholder community. In traditional terms, a product owner is in many ways an empowered business analyst without the burden of the bureaucracy surrounding big requirements up front (BRUF)>.
The role of product owner was introduced to the agile community by Scrum, although the onsite customer practice of Extreme Programming (XP) is very similar. This role has been adopted by the Disciplined Agile Delivery(DAD) process framework.
As a stakeholder proxy, the product owner:
- Is the "go to" person for domain information
- Provides timely information and decisions
- Prioritizes requirements, defects, and other work items for the team
- Is an active participant in modeling (sometimes mistakenly called backlog grooming or backlog refinement)
- Is an active participant in customer testing
- Helps the team gain access to expert stakeholders
- Facilitates requirements modeling sessions, including requirements envisioning
- Educates team in the business domain
- Is the gateway to funding
- Manages requirements dependencies with other teams, negotiating and reprioritizing as appropriate. See Managing Requirements Dependencies between Agile Teams, Managing Requirements Dependencies between Agile and Lean Teams, and Managing Requirements Dependencies between Agile/Lean and Traditional Teams for more detailed discussions.
When representing the agile team to the stakeholder community, the product owner:
- Is the public face of team to project stakeholders
- Demos the solution to key stakeholders who weren't able to attend the normal iteration demo
- Announces releases
- Communicates team status
- Organizes milestone reviews
- Facilitates requirements modeling sessions
- Educates stakeholders in the development process
- Negotiates priorities, scope, funding, and schedule
Figure 1. The role of Product Owner.
Product Owners at Scale
Figure 2 depicts a typical organization structure for a large agile team. The subteams will be organized either around the architecture of the system (a component team approach), around the requirements (a feature team approach), an internal open source strategy, or combinations there of. Regardless, each of the subteams will need to have access to a product owner (although any given product owner could work with more than one subteam). The product owners will be part of the product owner team, lead by a chief product owner. This product owner team will:
- Manage the requirements for the overall program
- Negotiate functional dependencies between requirements being implemented by different subteam, potentially reprioritizing requirements to reflect those dependencies
- Manage consistency of the requirements between subteams
- Assign requirements between subteams in a consistent and sensible manner
Figure 2. Organization structure of a large agile team.
Where Do Product Owners Come From?
My experience is that the best product owners are empowered stakeholders (from either the IT or business side) who have been educated, trained, and mentored in the role of product ownership. Having said that, it is often very difficult to find such people who are willing to fill the role of PO.
The role of PO is very hard to fill. Even when provided good training, which doesn't happen as often as it should, it will still be a struggle. If you're interested in good PO training, I suggest that you consider this 2-day Product Owner Workshop.
Let Us Help
We actively work with clients around the world to improve their information technology (IT) practices, typically in the role of mentor/coach, team lead, or trainer. https://dissertationswritingservice.com of what we do, and how to contact us, can be found at Scott Ambler + Associates.