Product Owner is part of an agile organisation and is the leader of the agile team. The Product Owner’s responsibilities include. Backlog Backlog management and communication between different stakeholders. The content and responsibilities of the Product Owner’s tasks vary greatly depending on the entity being developed and the development teams’ working models.

Nextcon expert Tero Pänttönen The tasks and responsibilities of a Product Owner are very familiar from years of experience. Tero joined Nextcon in May as a Product Owner Traficom customer relationship. We interviewed him and asked him about the everyday life of a product owner and the importance of this role in an agile organisation.

Discussions are an essential part of a product owner’s daily life

The role of a product owner is very diverse and one of the most important aspects is the cooperation with customers, product management, business owner and other stakeholders. The Product Owner is in constant communication about dependencies between teams, so discussions and interaction are a big part of the Product Owner’s daily work.

– The product owner acts as a kind of filter between the rest of the organisation and the development team, so that the team can focus on the essentials, i.e. product development, Pänttönen says and continues,

– The Product Owner gathers information from stakeholders to make decisions about what is really relevant to the product and the end customer. The PO is the “voice” of the customer and is responsible for ensuring that the product meets the customer’s needs.

One of the Product Owner’s main tasks is to deliver value

The Product Owner’s main task is to deliver value to the organisation and customers, and this involves prioritising tasks and assessing workloads. The Product Owner must be able to assess which of the items on the backlog will deliver the most value, justify why it is being done and ultimately ensure that the team does the agreed items.

One of the important decisions is often what NOT to do.

– Stakeholders come up with lots of ideas and there are always more than can be implemented. The Product Owner prioritises what needs to be done and makes sure that what needs to be done solves customer problems, implements the company’s strategy and enables the achievement of business objectives. It is always good to have validated concepts for the blanks to be developed, but sometimes you still have to make “guesses based on experience and insight”, Pänttönen admits.

Characteristics of a good Product Owner

According to Pänttönen, the most important qualities of a Product Owner are the ability to prioritise, ability to cope with pressure, good interaction and communication skills, and the ability to manage the bigger picture. A good Product Owner is able to put himself in the customer’s position, so that all the essentials are taken into account in the development of the product.

– A product owner is first and foremost an expert who understands and anticipates the needs of the customer. Knowledge of the customer’s market and business, as well as good communication skills, will help the Product Owner to better manage the development efforts of his team.

Practicality, clarity and technical expertise are also important qualities for product owners. The PO must be able to tell the user story in an understandable way and ensure that the team has prioritised tasks in the task queue. Pänttönen says that the user story has a big impact on the effectiveness of the team’s work.

– The purpose of the user story is to clarify the functionality of the product for the development team. The user story should always be tested with customers, e.g. through service design, and the resulting concept should be validated to avoid unnecessary work.

The end result can only be as good as the effort put into it

The product owner has a big say in how the investment in the product will ultimately pay off. If the local team does not get value-added tasks and properly defined stories for the backlog, the end result will be a service that is poorly suited to customer needs.

Often the problem arises when the full-time Product Owner role is performed by someone from within the organisation in addition to their own position. In this case, the risk is that the lack of time of the PO will reduce the workload of the development team and the meaningfulness and value creation of the work may suffer.

“The end result can only be as good as the effort put into it, and if you have to do a full-time role left-handed, the end result will be accordingly.”

Pänttönen sees the role of a product owner as definitely full-time, as there are a lot of responsibilities and expectations involved in the work of a PO. Today, organisations are increasingly waking up to the fact that it is worth hiring a dedicated person for the role of product owner.

– Change is in the air and increasingly, agile organisations are hiring either an external consultant or a completely new person to take on the role of product owner. There are pros and cons to both solutions, and it is a good idea to discuss with an external specialist organisation the model that can be made to work.

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