In this article
1.1 What is a Product Owner?
A Product Owner is a role defined in Scrum. Scrum is a framework for complex product development (*). The Product Owner is responsible for maximising the value of the product resulting from the work performed the Development Team. The role exists in Scrum to have 1 person with a clear accountability of WHAT product or service will be built. The Product Owner role is also used as a title outside Scrum, in other frameworks, but if you want to understand the definition of the role and responsibilities of a Product Owner, you need to start to look and to understand it in the scope of a Scrum Team.
(*) (“product”, to be defined in context, this is a generic term for the product or service being developed for the end-users)
(*) (“development”, also to be defined in context, this is a generic term for all activities needed to create and deliver value to the end-users)
1.2 What’s the job profile of a Product Owner?
The Product Owner role is Scrum is a role, both with a tactical, strategical and operational aspect. The Product Owner role is critical as the role is kept by 1 person (and 1 person only) for a specific product. Having 1 person holding the role simplifies the accountability in terms of having 1 spokesperson for product ownership and accountability of maximising value. This doesn’t mean that all activities are to be done by the Product Owner; otherwise the Product Owner could become a bottleneck. The Product Owner does remain accountable at all times.
To be able to do the job, the Product Owner has business (domain) knowledge, affinity with end-users, affinity with “development” (activities needed to deliver a piece of value), and knowledge of how to do agile product management. Product management is a multi-disciplinary job, and it involves to understand, empathise, quickly inspect & adapt, each time with the accountability to make the right choices in terms of what to built next, in order to continuously (incrementally) deliver value to end-users.
In order to better understand what kind of profile is needed to fulfil the product owner role, it’s valuable to list skills required and activities performed.
When looking for a Product Owner, you’re looking for a profile with generic product management skills and product-specific skills.
The generic skills are needed to be able make decisions on a strategic and tactical level.
People skills a Product Owner must have:
A Product Owner also needs people skills:
- To empathise with users of the product
- To build connections with stakeholders and to create a healthy working relationship with the team building the product.
These people skills include- to be able to listen (to stakeholders, end users, team members), to translate information (between people with a different background), to be able to make informed decisions without undermining longer-term objectives, etc.
The product-specific skills are defined by the product or service that’s being built. This includes all the activities to understand the market, the needs, the job the product or service will fulfil, user-journeys, also more technical product-specific knowledge, legislation (if applicable), financial implications and any other constraint
In his book Product Mastery “From Good to Great Product Ownership”, Geoff Watts describes the skills of Product Owners with the acronym “
1.3 Product Owner role and responsibilities
The role of Product Owner can be quite challenging and high-demanding.
When reading The Scrum Guide, it says that product backlog management is the main activity for a Product Owner. The product backlog is a tool to ensure it’s clear what’s needed in the product and what’s the most valuable thing to build next. Managing a backlog, and refining items on the product backlog is a continuous activity.
The Product Owner often serves as the spokesperson of the product. This means he/she needs to be able to answers questions appropriately, for example regarding product vision, roadmap, planning, why certain choices have been made, etc. This also includes NOT answering certain questions, because the Product Owner knows the development team is in a more appropriate position to answer the question more accurately, and as well to facilitate a conversation with the development team involved.
Go through other roles and responsibilities of Product Owner here.
1.4 How does a Product Owner manage various stakeholders desires for the product?
The Product Owner has the challenging task to manage requirements and desires of stakeholders. Each stakeholders will certainly advocate his/her demands are the most important.
Here are some recommendations on how a Product Owner can deal with this:
- Treat requirements & desires as “desirements”, meaning, until by learning or by end-user feedback has been proven that the “desirement” is valuable, treat it as a hypothesis
- Keep the product backlog and its ordening as transparent as possible to all stakeholders
- Don’t be seduced to prioritising in categories such as high, medium, low priority. A product backlog is ordered, no two items can have the same priority.
- Use techniques to prioritise impacts (impact mapping), simulations to learn stakeholders to prioritise (e.g. buy a feature), techniques to slice for value (user story mapping)
1.5 CSPO vs PSPO
CSPO is an abbreviation which stands for Certified Scrum Product Owner. This is a certification offered by the Scrum Alliance, specifically for the Product Owner role.
PSPO is an abbreviation which stands for Profession Scrum Product Owner. This is a certification offered by scrum.org, specifically for the Product Owner role.
In my opinion, both certifications are equivalent and define a high-quality standard. There’s a difference in the way of obtaining certifications and how to maintain this.
Certifications issued by Scrum Alliance are obtained by taking an online exam after mandatory attending a 2-day training given by a Certified Scrum Trainer.
Certifications issued by scrum.org are obtained by taking an online exam without the prerequisite of attending a training. Certifications issued by scrum.org do not expire. Of course, to test and validate your knowledge, having a decent understanding of the product owner role is mandatory, therefore preparation and study are key. Participating in a training to learn, and to experience what Scrum is about, is always highly recommended.
1.6 Product owner in agile software development
The manifesto of agile software development does not specify anything about the Product Owner role. Therefore, it’s perfectly possible to have an agile team without a Product Owner.
The manifesto for agile software development does state a few principles which illustrate how we want to work regarding product and value delivery, for example:
- “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software;”
- “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development;”
- “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale;”
- “Business people and developers must work together daily; “
- “Working software is the primary measure of progress;”
You can interpret these principles as following, in what you should NOT be doing…
- Waste time & effort creating long-term plans, long cycle times, etc without actually delivery usable product increments to the end-users, …
- Waste time & effort on unnecessary specifications; unfinished product (“inventory”); or unvalidated requirements (which are assumptions in disguise), …
- Waste time & effort on unnecessary handovers between business people and development teams, …
- Waste time & effort on assuming what’s valuable for the end-users, and not verifying this by letting end-users try out working software and based upon their feedback, inspect & adapt, improve the product together, …
- Wasting time & effort in demanding upfront detailed estimates for unreasonable long periods (e.g. all estimates for the next year…)
- Wasting time & effort on detailed long-term planning, fixing agreements, treating change as evil, …
1.7 Product owner in Scaling Agile
Lets first make the statement that you need to consider it twice before blindly scaling up any development efforts. In general, we are trying to deliver value by keeping things simple, simplify working processes, and collaborate to maximise effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
In case you need to align several development teams to work together on the same product, take the following into account:
- A product has 1 product owner, this means in case of several teams developing on the same product, there’s 1 product owner
- A product is defined as something meaningful and valuable for a customer or end-user, not a technical component
- A product has 1 product backlog, as long the product lives, the product backlog exists
- A product owner can delegate areas of the product to other product owners, but take care to not have “proxy” product owners, with a mandate to decide. The ‘chief’ product owner remains accountable for overall prioritisation.
- Some scaling frameworks make a distinction between “product management” and “product ownership”, in any case ensure there’s alignment regarding product management, no conflict in priorities, and no unnecessary handovers of information.
1.8 Who is accountable for the business value delivered by a Scrum team?
The Product Owner is responsible for maximising the value.
A Scrum Team collaborates to deliver value together. The Product Owner remains accountable.
1.9 What exactly is the role of the Product Owner during the Daily Scrum?
The Product Owner is not required to attend the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is an inspect & adapt time-boxed event for the development and performed by the development. This is defined in this way because otherwise the Daily Scrum will quickly be run as a status meeting (and not a daily planning event).
Of course, the Product Owner can be present during the Daily Scrum, as it’s a great moment to check-in with a team, listen how a team is synchronising, ask and answer questions - after the Daily Scrum. The Product Owner, nor the Scrum Master should be leading the Daily Scrum. They can be present, but the Daily Scrum is an activity (‘Scrum’ metaphor of Rugby), for and by the development team. The Product Owner defines a sprint goal (a sprint is a time-boxed iteration to deliver a potentially shippable product increment); the Development Team inspects its progress on a daily basis towards that sprint goal, using the sprint backlog.
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1.10 What are certain anti-patterns regarding Product Owner?
Some example anti-patterns regarding Product Owners; this can be used in an exercise to coach Product Owners.
- Ask what should be done to be the WORSE Product Owner
- Identify what’s actually being done of that list
- Identify what should be STOPPED doing, in order to improve
Some anti-patterns of Product Ownership
- Becoming a bottleneck in communication, so that’s there’s a delay in the flow of value between the development team, end-users, and stakeholders, …
- Taking decisions in isolation, so that the reason why decisions are taken are not known, nor understood, …
- Specifying technical solutions, and not articulating the business value, … (technical solutions are the responsibility of a development team)
- Pressuring the speed of delivery, resulting in less quality and inability to validate if value is being delivered, …
- Not listening to the product development team’s recommendations, not engaging in any healthy dialogue, …
- Not articulating the product’s vision, and/or strategy, resulting in development teams functioning as “feature factory”, without investigating what’s valuable and what’s not, …
- Inadequate product backlog management, resulting in unready items to plan, long inventory, unclear prioritisation, …
- Not accepting or rejecting work according to the definition of done, resulting in unclear standards of what’s a done product increment, …
- Not thinking how to delivery slices of value, forcing development teams to deliver components, instead of ready-to-use product increments, …
- Not facilitating a sprint review
- Not participating in any retrospective
- Not updating any forecast after finishing a sprint
- Not engaging with end-users / customers to get feedback etc
2 What is the process to get a CSPO certificate?
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You can also follow the below steps to understand clearly.
Find a Certified Scrum Product Owner course on the Scrum Alliance website
Read and understand the Scrum Guide
Read and understand the manifesto for agile software development
Read and understand the learning objectives of a CSPO course
Attend the 2-day CSPO Training
Complete the online CSPO exam, the fee is included in the course price. After completing the course, your Scrum Trainer will upload your user information into the system of Scrum Alliance, next you’ll receive an invite to do the online exam.
Recommended books and material to read and further prepare:
Articles by Roman Pichler,
Book Product Mastery, by Geoff Watts,
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Path forward after CSPO at Scrum Alliance
Certification gives you access to a renewable, two-year membership with Scrum Alliance. As a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO™), you can continue your educational development to become an:
- Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO™)
- Certified Scrum Professional - Product Owner (CSP-PO™)
- Certified Team Coach (CTC™)
- Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC™)
- Certified Scrum Trainer (CST™)
Remember, if you’re starting as Product Owner, the CSPO certification is only the start of your journey!
Conclusion
Being a product owner is a satisfying job! You are the main spokesperson for the product. You act as a catalyst between the Development Team and the outside world. You take decisions to maximise product value while taking into account various constraints.
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