Product Owner Responsibilities
November 19, 2007 by Artem Marchenko
Product owner is one of the three Scrum roles. The responsibilities of the Scrum product owner are pretty much the ones of any businessman. Product owner decides what the project is all about, who is going to benefit from it and what the project priorities are. He is the one who secures funding, cares about the return on investment (ROI) and manages money.
The difference from more traditional approaches is in that agile methods actually allow take all the technical details away from the product owner and let him to focus on managing business value. Agile processes explicitly separate whats from hows. Product owner is the king in the what area and cannot influence the how area. Exceptions might exist as in the cases when additional funding is needed in order to improve the team velocity, but even in this case product owner is to see what value (increased velocity) the customer gets from the investment.
Put into a simple list, typical product owner responsibilities are:
- decide on the project vision - who is going to benefit from the project and how;
- secure funding;
- continuously make decisions on the product priorities - what is more important with the latest information in mind;
- continuously make decisions on maximizing the product ROI - make sure the features with the biggest benefit/cost ratio are developed first.
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About the Author: As the Editor-in-Chief for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Artem is charged with overseeing the direction for content, advertising, and the overall management of the site. Nowadays in his day life, Artem is a product manager in a global telecommunication company where he leads the development of a product developed in extremely distributed environment. Artem has been applying Agile and researching Agile since 2005. Contact Artem
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Comments
Can Product Owner be a Project Manager?
June 17, 2008 by Phani (not verified), 3 years 48 weeks ago
Comment id: 1587
After i read the above content, i have a query :
Can a product owner be a project manager?
If that is so, then will his roles and responsibilites differ from the above metnioned ones...
I found some where on net:
# The Enterprise Product Manager, who typically reports into marketing, and who owns the RELEASE
# The Agile Product Owner, who typically reports into engineering, and who owns the ITERATION
Usually not
June 17, 2008 by Artem, 3 years 48 weeks ago
Comment id: 1589
Project manager role is not very compatible with Scrum or Extreme Programming. The agile team is self-managing and doesn't need a manager to tell them what to do. Scrum Master is a role closest to a traditional product manager, but Scrum Master doesn't really manage, he facilities the collaboration (e.g. helps resolving personality problems or teaches the process) and removes impediments that are out of the team control.
Certainly you can be agile and have project managers - it is just so that if you want to be efficient your project manager will have to lean towards the Scrum Master or Product Owner role. Unfortunately, in reality introducing project manager to agile process usually does more harm, than benefit.
Why would your agile team need a project manager?
Not that bad
October 20, 2009 by Inanc (not verified), 2 years 30 weeks ago
Comment id: 3946
I have first hand experienced being a PO and the same being a SM is not a problem at all. These roles can be combined into a fulltime responsibilities. Also, if you want to participate in business side, do so. If you need to participate in the technology side, do so. Just adapt, inspect and act quick (not a messy quick, just have an urgent, not self-destructing attitude). As a PO, you also don't need to manage money, this is plain wrong. You need to manage stakeholders/managers/team's needs and balance them.
Also, I need to emphasize on that my comments probably only belong and adapted for my company :)
This post has pointed out
March 2, 2012 by NOnn (not verified), 11 weeks 3 days ago
Comment id: 21173
This post has pointed out several methods that we have used to unsuccessfully develop product owners. The issue we have is primarily Product Owner participation. The Department Managers have taken on this role yet cannot fulfill the time commitment to the team. yet they will not empower others with the authority that the Product Owner needs to perform their role effectively. How do you approach this situation? forfait mobile forfait sans engagement forfait illimite sms illimite forfait mobile internet comparateur forfait bloque rio bouygues numero rio orange numero rio sfr rio bouygues code rio virgin calcul imc portabilite
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