What does a Product Owner do?
Every wondered what the role of a product owner is and what they do on a day-to-day basis on a project? In a nutshell, they are the people who take the Product and maximise its value within the business. Here is a very simple guide to what is involved.
A Product Owner works with key members (stakeholders) in the wider business (company) to ensure that their pain-points (annoying issues) and requirements (what they’d like it to do) are understood. These are put into a backlog (long list of wants and needs) and prioritised (ordered) based on their value back to the business (usually against a roadmap, business objective or longer-term strategy).
There is a lot of jargon in Product.
The downside of this type of language, is it can quickly alienate people that are not used to this process or are unfamiliar with the way the project is being delivered (usually referred to as a methodology). If you’re a non-technical business, it can be tough understanding what all the lingo means and what is going on.
Every project is different.
Every business, project and team structure is different so the role of a Product Owner can vary depending on these things. In some businesses, it might be a huge team with all the team members having a very focused and strict role. This allows for clear actions for a Product Owner. In other teams, who might be smaller or new to this way of working, a Product Owner might also take on other responsibilities as part of the role such as Product Management, Project Management and Head of Product.
What qualifies as a Product?
A Product can be a wide range of things. It could be something physical, like a car or more virtual, like a service to sell you or educate you in something. It might also be a mixture of both of these things. For example, you might download an app to get access to some information and then pay a monthly fee to get more information, or keep access to it.
They’re usually for a customer - something you are making to be purchased and enjoyed by someone else
It offers a benefit - by having this product, you’re delivering a benefit of some sort to your customers
A customer could be an individual or a business
What would I do as a Product Owner?
If you were launching a new project, you’d need to consider a few things:
What are your goals for this product (strategy & objectives)
Whats it going to look like (Ideas)
How are you going to do it (plans, value, teams)
How are you going to present this plan (stakeholders to review, roadmap, route to market)
How are you going to build it (methodologies)
How are you going to launch it to your market (plans)
How will you track its success and how will you improve it? (analyse, report, feedback, backlog)
If you’re heading into a company as a Product Owner and the Product already exists, you might already have the key information - such as the strategy and objectives - but you may need to solve problems that the customers are having with the Product.
Things you can expect to do as a Product Owner
Develop and implement product strategies that are helping the company to align to their business objectives (goals)
Managing a product roadmap (an organised documents on how you’re going to reach your objectives) and updating all key stakeholders of the progress
Out of a long list of wants, you’ll need to define and prioritise what features/initiatives should be worked on and in what order. This is cross-referenced with the customer needs, the business objectives and what is technically feasible (time, tech, money).
You’ll need to define requirements (the wants) about the features, write acceptance criteria (what it must be able to do before being accepted) and user stories/epics (a plain explanation from the. users point of view)
Be able to identify any risks, blockers, dependancies and any potential trade-offs that will need to be considered in order to deliver.
Work with a variety of teams such as developers, engineers, ux/cx designers as well as different stakeholders in the business
Be able to understand data, and use this to drive decisions and prioritise problems to solve.
If you’re looking to move to a career in this area, I would highly recommend checking out the guides on the Atlassian website to give you a good overview of the role, and how it fits into the wider team.
