Agile 101: Product Owner

Michael is the President of Sapir Consulting. He has been providing operational, organizational and management consulting and training for over 14 years. He is a certified project management professional and Gestalt process facilitator, offering training, consulting and solutions development in project and product management, process improvement, leadership and team-building programs.

  Agile   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

The role of Product Owner, at once strategic and tactical, is misunderstood by many companies transitioning to Scrum or Agile approaches. The product owner serves as both organizational change agent and bridge between the business side and the project team. Here’s a basic primer on this indispensable role.

In a Scrum-Agile project management environment, the product owner acts as a catalyst of change in the organization, enabling value creation through projects and products. Product owners create the required link between how the business would look like in the future and the current state. The product owner is a key facilitator within the organization in bridging the client and the business community with the Agile development team.

Most of what a product owner performs can be defined in the broader sense as: 1) Creating and increasing value for the business, and 2) Eliminating and reducing costs for the business.

The product owner is required to identify business needs and determine solutions to business challenges. We can characterize the role description of the product owner as related to the above tasks into several key responsibilities. The product owner needs to:

1. Mine for and create epics that guide the business towards value creation and cost savings;
2. Plan and maintain epics, themes and user stories;
3. Elicit epics, themes and user stories;…

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