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Product Owner
Hakan Saglam @ Sony
January, 2013

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Topics
 What / Who is PO?
 How to select a PO in your organization?
 What are the PO responsibilities?
 What are the key skills of a PO?
 What are the common mistakes of a PO?
 Reference List

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What / Who is PO?

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What / Who is PO?
As the name suggests, a product owner should own the product on behalf of the
company. You can think of the product owner as the individual who champions the
product, who facilitates the product decisions, and who has the final say about the
product, for instance, if feedback is integrated into the product backlog, or when which
features are released. The following diagram provides an overview of the product owner
role.

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How to select a PO?

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How to select a PO?
 The Customer Plays the Product Owner Role
• Advantages
The customer steers and controls the development of the software directly.
This allows the customer to own the product, speeds up decision-making, and
increases the likelihood of creating a product that serves the customer
needs.
• Challenges
The customer must be available, qualified, and empowered to create a
successful product. The customer and the team must value transparency and
develop a healthy, trustful relationship. The latter tends to be particularly
challenging when the customer and the team have different interests, for
instance, getting the essential features shipped as soon as possible vs.
maximizing revenue, or if they have had difficulties to collaborate in the past
(“IT never delivers”).

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How to select a PO?
 A Customer Proxy Fills the Product Owner Role
• Advantages
Separating the customer and the product owner role helps create a product
that addresses all the needs selected. It also provides the opportunity to
employ professional full-time product owners with the right skills: Product
managers, project managers, and business analysts can focus on playing the
role effectively.
• Challenges
Empowerment of the product owner can be difficult to achieve: Product
owners often require the trust and support of senior management to be able
to make the necessary decisions, to have the clout to say no, and to create
stakeholder alignment. Companies that regard IT largely as a commodity can
find it difficult to value product ownership and to invest in developing
product owners.

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Responsibilities of a PO

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Responsibilities of a PO
The responsibilities of the Product Owner are onerous and
there is no one else on the team to cover for him/her or pick up
the slack. So if you’re choosing a Product Owner, choose wisely,
the difference can be success or failure for the entire project.
Before listing the responsibilities very first thing to say or the
most important and primary thing of PO is VISION. Vision is
the minimum plan necessary to start a Scrum project consists
of a vision and a Product Backlog. The vision describes why the
project is being undertaken and what the desired end state is.

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Responsibilities of a PO
 PO emphasize the vision and the goals at the beginning of
each sprint or release.
 PO creates and maintains the product backlog.
 PO prioritizes and sequences the product backlog
according to business value or ROI prior to sprint planning.
 PO details the Epic, Theme, Feature into user stories that
are granular enough to be achieved in a single sprint.
 PO represent the customer, and continuously keep the
customer feedbacks to have the right product.

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Responsibilities of a PO
 PO support team to define DoR (definition of ready) and
DoD (definition of done).
 PO participates the Sprint Planning and Review, Grooming
Meeting and Retrospective Meetings but not that much
needed for daily meetings.
 PO has complete authority to accept or reject the works
which has been demonstrated.
 PO is the voice of the product (indirectly the team) to the
outside world.
 PO can terminates a sprint, if a drastic change is required in
an urgent manner.

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Key Skills of a PO

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Key Skills of a PO
 PO should be strong, must not afraid to make though
decisions.
 PO should be present, spend all of his/her time to this role.
 PO should be empowered, he has to gain that empower.
 PO should be trustful by team and customer.
 PO should have true understanding of customer needs.
 PO should have basic knowledge of how software is
developed and deployed.

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Common Mistakes of a PO

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Common Mistakes of a PO
 “We’ll figure this out later” (Lack of product goal and vision).
 “Everything is important!” (Lack of product priorities).
 “Let me ask the client about this” (Lack of decision-making power).
 “I have something else to do” (Lack of time or overworked PO).
 PO should resist the temptation of micro management.
 PO should think twice before interrupting the team about
other than sprint goals.
 PO should be at same place physically with the team.

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Reference List
 http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/roles/one-page-product-owner/
 http://agile.dzone.com/articles/product-owner-top-10
 http://top7business.com/?Top-7-Responsibilities-of-a-Scrum-Product-
Owner&id=11111
 http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/44-being-an-effective-product-owner
 http://www.dalmenyclose.com/blog/2011/August/product_owner_in_scrum_-
_proxy_product_owner_or_scrummaster.html
 http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/roles/avoiding-common-product-owner-mistake/
 http://www.thenetcircle.com/2010/07/27/five-mistakes-of-a-scrum-product-owner-
that-can-make-your-project-fail/
 http://www.implementingscrum.com/section/blog/cartoons/

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Thank you…