Who is a Kanban Product Owner and What Do They Do?

Kanban is one of the highly popular agile project management methodologies. Kanban helps in managing projects by taking a visual, appealing and intuitive approach with a focus on delivery, which helps teams to improve their efficiency and output both. By breaking a project into smaller units, Kanban emphasizes a high degree of collaboration and constant customer involvement. 

Kanban methodology starts with 'now' and then takes a gradual and incremental approach. It encourages working with existing roles and promotes leadership, innovation and ideas for improvement. All these lay the foundation of the Kanban principle. Although Kanban does not promote any defined and static roles and duties of the team members, the role of a product owner (or manager) with various serious responsibilities is not uncommon to see in complex Kanban projects. In this article, we will have a detailed understanding of a Kanban product owner (PO), the different tasks that a product owner shoulders and how to become a good product owner in Kanban.

Who is a Product Owner?

In an agile team, the product owner is someone who acts as a customer advocate serving as the ‘voice of the customer’, and also the main connecting interface with business and technology functions involving and balancing multiple stakeholders. 

The product owner remains connected with the customer and different stakeholders constantly, with the aim to maximize the value of the delivered outcome and also ensure that the product is aligned with the customer's needs. While contributing to the vision and roadmap, the product manager oversees that the product strategy and implementation remain connected throughout the value stream. It goes without saying that some Agile certificate programs are a minimum requirement to become a successful product owner. 

Who is a Kanban Product Owner?

Does Kanban have a product owner?

Kanban does not have the concept of anyone working exclusively playing the role of a product owner. Nevertheless, depending on the complexity of a Kanban project and also the organization adopting Kanban, we get to see some defined roles of a product owner. 

A product owner in Kanban (also called a product manager) can be described as the defender of a customer who ensures that the product meets a customer’s demands and expectations in all aspects and delivers value to the customer. The PO is also someone who represents all the project’s stakeholders involved in the outcome of the final product/service. 

The role of a Kanban product owner is quite challenging. Because, in any big organization, building a product itself is complex with multifaceted elements engaged, enormous work involvement and ever-new demands to be met. At the same time, keeping pace with the need for product innovation, focusing on the roadmap and meeting all the customer demands and satisfying them along with adding value is yet another daunting task that fills up the routine work of a product owner.

 How To Become a Product Owner With Kanban?

As we have seen, a product owner holds critical accountability, guides the actions, and sets the right direction in any Agile team and Kanban. Should you aspire to become a good Kanban product owner, the following steps will help you: 

1. Get Trained

First and foremost, without learning no one becomes a master. In Kanban too, if you wish to excel, you will have to move towards more advanced classes by taking some Kanban courses. 

Such training will also establish your credibility as a product owner with a certificate that you receive. But please remember that getting certificates alone cannot lead you to be a good product owner. You will have to apply the knowledge in practice and also keep learning and growing your experience as you go. 

2. Gain Experience

Training and certificates are best justified when you start working in the field applying the skills learnt. But for freshers, this could be difficult because companies mostly want to hire experienced people for this kind of responsibility. In such a case, the best approach for you could be going for junior roles, joining as a trainee or working for experience and applying all the skills learnt in the training program. Reach out to the product owner to learn more, and keep building further skills. After gaining thorough experience you can then apply for product owner roles. 

3. Community involvement

Meeting other Kanban product owners, following them, participating in the discussion, and raising queries are great ways of improving and consolidating your knowledge. It can easily be done virtually by joining forums and groups like Agile LinkedIn, Meetup, or others. 

4. Keep Reading

Reading one or two books a month on any agile framework and product ownership will be of great help for continuous improvement and getting more innovative ideas. Among all the popular books available, just to name a few, are: 

• Kanban Made Simple: Demystifying and Applying Toyota's Legendary Manufacturing Process - By John M. Gross, Kenneth R. McInnis
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works ) ByAsh Maurya
• Lean Mastery Collection: Lean Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Enterprise, Lean Analytics, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum, Kaizen for Scrum, Kanban, Sprint, Dsdm XP & Crystal) By Jeffrey Ries 
• Kanban Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business ByDavid J. Anderson, Donald G Reinertsen

There are plenty of blog resources as well to enrich you such as KnowledegHut blogs.

5. Get Mentors

A mentor would be of great help in your path with proven and experienced answers or solutions to the problems that you might confront and help accelerate your learning process. 

It may not be quite easy to find experienced product owners who would be willing to devote time and guide you. Still, you could explore LinkedIn and try to connect with people and possibly may come across someone you are looking for. 

Different Roles in Kanban

In agile methodology like Kanban, responsibilities are more important than job titles and focus on collaboration and collective ownership. 

 Kanban follows flexible roles and team members are not confined to one specific function but move between different roles as required to optimize the workflow. For example, someone responsible for coding might become a service delivery manager for a while to help the workflow. Nevertheless, two main roles are common in Kanban. These are Service Delivery Manager (SDM) and Service Request Manager (SRM). 

1. Service Delivery Manager

Leading the team, coordinating between the members, ensuring that the Kanban methodology is followed by the team and also removing any obstacle that might prevent the smooth work of the team are the chief responsibilities of a Service Delivery Manager or SDM. Furthermore, an SDM also facilitates communication between the team members and stakeholders ensuring that everyone is on the same page in the understanding of what is required to be done. However, it is not a sole or dedicated role. Any team member could play the role of an SDM to help the team work efficiently and optimize the workflow. 

2. Service Request Manager

As the name suggests, the role of a Service Request Manager (SRM) is to handle the customer requests and assures that they are passed on to the appropriate team and also validate that the team has a clear understanding of the customer needs in terms of a customer’s business goals, the existing pain points and a clear idea of how the product or service will remove them. The SRM maintains a close relationship with a customer, gets timely feedback from the customer and passes it on to the team for improvement of the work. 

 Working in tandem, the SDM and SRM ensure that a customer’s requests/needs are clearly and correctly understood and addressed on time. Prioritization of tasks or work items, improvement of corporate governance to reduce confusion and a common focused goal are also the roles an SRM plays. 

Roles and Responsibilities of Kanban Product Owner

 A Kanban product manager needs to perform critical tasks. However, the main highlights of the roles among others could be as follows: 

1. Helping team to focus on immediate tickets/tasks, at the same time having a clear understanding of the backlog with a perfect idea of the kind of tickets that are present, in terms of criticality, size, time etc. Managing backlog and at the same time allowing team to focus on immediate priority items is a very important role of a product owner. 
2. Work prioritization and providing better visibility to the team on priorities by using various tools like JIRA. A product owner makes priorities visible to the team by scheduling tickets (say by order of priority or by separating the ones that are needed to be completed in the next two to three days or a week etc) as per their priorities. 
3. The larger backlogs could be temporarily removed from the team’s view to avoid confusion, provide better visibility of the scheduled work, and implement a good work intake process. Bringing backlog under control takes time, continuous focus on understanding the backlog, clear direction on priorities is an important aspect of a product owner’s role. 
4. Improving lead and cycle times. A product owner tackles this in a couple of ways. For example, by identifying the larger backlog tickets and getting them completed or moving them out of the Kanban board for a while so as the teams can better focus on the current priorities without confusion. It helps in improving the lead and cycle times. Secondly, lead and cycle times can also be enhanced by reducing the wait times due to customer dependencies (for example lowering the wait time for the customer-validation by frequent follow-ups). The PO, being the customer advocate, contacts the customer to expedite the process thus improving the lead/cycle time. Only a PO can take such decisions and approaches. 

Difference Between Kanban Product Owner and Scrum Product Owner 

As we mentioned, in Kanban, there are no set roles or rigid structures. Kanban has fluidity, and a team member can become an SDM, SRM or a product manager, especially for large and more complex Kanban projects where roles keep evolving with the needs of the project and the company as well. Because a Kanban team is not cross-functional since the work-flow is supposed to be used by any and many teams involved in the project. For example, a specialist team and a generalist team may work in tandem on different aspects of the same Kanban project sharing the same Kanban board. 

The same is not the case for Scrum, which has three assigned roles: the product owner, Scrum master and team members with duties and responsibilities fixed for each role, and they work together in an orderly and balanced way. For example, in Scrum a product owner cannot be a Scrum master and they always have separate roles. In case a Scrum master acts as a product owner, the person will not have the same access to customer feedback, and without complete data, it is difficult to create a product/service that fulfills the customer’s goals. 

Again, if a product owner acts as a Scrum master, the person will have to take on new responsibilities that deflect the original role. The reason is, the product owner is a full-time job, and taking on Scrum master responsibilities means somewhere some compromise needs to be made while creating the product backlog and managing the development process. Obviously, then, there will be less room for innovation, more focus will be given on meeting the deadlines and ultimately, the value of the product/service will suffer. 

Leading for Success

A product owner needs to understand the team’s capability and shortcomings and plan accordingly taking in consideration both value demand and failure demand as well. A product owner cannot be an expert in various different domains or sectors and it is not a must either. No doubt a strong understanding of the product/service domain and the business value it delivers is required, but it does not mean to have a monopoly on all the facets of it. 

Instead, a product owner needs to recognize the beneficial ideas coming from multiple sources and be able to harness them. It is like orchestrating all the different streams of suggestions, questions, ideas, even defects and change requests. Then creating a common theme and arriving at a coherent symphony of a roadmap so that the members can easily understand the what, why and when just by looking at the roadmap. Furthermore, it keeps the members satisfied and happy that each and every idea was heard and some, if not all, were implemented too. It creates a faith in the system that works well which in turn encourages to bring out better features in the product/service that customers will appreciate and want to use time and again. 

Conclusion

A product manager’s job in a large or a midsized company is extremely challenging with multiple works to handle, and numerous new demands coming up. The challenge is not only to understand the team’s capability but also to create a balanced plan for both value and failure demands. Furthermore, while trying to meet the requirements of product innovation and the product roadmap, it is quite easy to have slip-offs somewhere or the other. All these make it worth learning some facilitation skills that come in handy to raise product value and manage product backlog effectively which Product Owner training gives.