WHAT DOES AN AGILE PRODUCT OWNER DO?

Published: Nov 21, 2024 – The Agile Product Owner defines and maintains the Clarity roadmap while ensuring the backlog accurately reflects the company's product goals. Stakeholder meetings are organized efficiently to identify and capture future deliverables, and this product owner distills ideas into scoped stories that provide business value. The role also involves close collaboration with the development team to ensure that stories are appropriately sized and prioritized while balancing decisiveness and ideation to meet realistic requirements.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Agile Product Owner

1. Agile Product Owner Accountabilities

  • Customer Journey Mapping: Understand the customer journey (digital and non-digital) of target customers.
  • Product Vision Leadership: Collaborate with others to lead product visioning and concept development.
  • Roadmap Development: Develop and maintain both product roadmaps and feature release plans.
  • Technology Roadmap Collaboration: Collaborate with the assigned Scrum Master and development team to create and maintain the technology roadmap for assigned products.
  • User Advocacy: Serve as the voice of both users and customers for the development team.
  • Clinical Strategy Development: Lead the development of assigned products' clinical strategies and content. Work with others internally to develop these strategies and content.
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Work with internal and external users, customers, and stakeholders to analyze their needs, assess value, and align the product roadmap with strategic goals.
  • Feedback Collection: Proactively collect user, client, and customer feedback on an ongoing basis.
  • Product Discovery: Conduct product discovery processes on an ongoing basis.
  • Backlog Management: Develop and maintain the product scope and define backlog items (epics, user stories, and features) that guide the development team.

2. Agile Product Owner Functions

  • Product Backlog Management: Develop and maintain a prioritized backlog of user stories and features; Ensure product backlog is visible to the team on an ongoing basis.
  • Problem Solving and Decision Making: Solve product-related problems, make decisions, and complete trade-off analyses to stay on track toward business deliverable commitments.
  • Business Strategy and Data Application: Draft key objectives and results, strategies and apply the data for the product to make business decisions.
  • Customer Experience Understanding: Gain an understanding of customer experience integration and dependencies.
  • Product Ownership and Communication: Accountable for the created products, delivering in the product model, and communicating the product needs to business partners.
  • Value Assessment and Prioritization: Assess value, develop and prioritize epics and stories to ensure work focuses on those with the greatest value and is aligned with product strategy and company goals.
  • Agile Practices: Participate in Sprint planning sessions, daily Scrum sessions, Sprint reviews, and Sprint retrospective meetings on an ongoing basis.
  • Business Model and Value Proposition: Identify and help customers understand the product's business model, its differentiated value proposition, and its unique selling proposition.
  • MVP and MMF Definition: Clearly define minimally viable products (MVPs) and minimally marketable features (MMFs) when developing new products or features.

3. Agile Product Owner Job Description

  • Product Ambassadorship: Act as an ambassador for the product internally and externally, and as the primary contact for queries related to the product.
  • Specification Development: Develop appropriately detailed specifications for the product features so they are clearly understood by the development teams.
  • Collaboration and Leadership: Collaborate with the Scrum Master to co-lead the development team.
  • Stakeholder Representation: Represents assigned products in front of stakeholders, customers, and users.
  • Strategic Alignment: Work closely with senior management to create products that fit the company portfolio and overall strategy.
  • Market and User Research: Research and analyze both markets and users to develop a product roadmap.
  • Competitive Analysis: Analyzes competitors and the overall industry, and defines how to win.
  • Agile Advocacy: Help increase an understanding of Agile practices within the organization.
  • Product Integration: Help integrate assigned products with the larger suite of ProtoCalls offerings.
  • Team Motivation: Help explain requests and motivate assigned Agile teams on an ongoing basis.

4. Agile Product Owner Role Purpose

  • Product Vision Development: Develop the vision of the Spectroscopy Solution and drive the implementation to increase customer value.
  • Requirement Gathering and Translation: Collect requirements from internal and external stakeholders and translate them into user stories.
  • Product Backlog Management: Manage the product backlog together with the development teams.
  • Stakeholder Management: Inform and manage internal and external stakeholders.
  • Agile Methodology Advocacy: Foster the agile way of working and drive further improvement.
  • Progress and Performance Monitoring: Monitor implementation progress and agile team performance.
  • Feature Breakdown and Story Creation: Break down Features from Product Management into small, deliverable user stories with clear acceptance criteria.
  • Product Direction: Provide daily product direction to 1 or 2 scrum teams.
  • Scope Alignment: Work with the Product Management team and Solution Architect to ensure scope alignment.
  • Feature Prioritization: Contribute to feature prioritization discussions with the Product Management team.

5. Agile Product Owner Duties and Roles

  • Roadmap Definition and Maintenance: Help define and maintain the Clarity roadmap.
  • Stakeholder Meeting Management: Organize and run stakeholder meetings that use everyone’s time efficiently to identify and capture future deliverable roadmap items.
  • Story Understanding and Architecture: Be responsible for ensuring stories are understood, architected, and sized appropriately by the development team.
  • Idea Distillation and Scoping: Distill a large volume of ideas from multiple stakeholders into scoped stories that give business value.
  • Scope Agreement and Definition: Re-check the agreement and scope definitions with key stakeholders.
  • Backlog Management: Keep an up-to-date backlog that accurately reflects the company and product roadmap.
  • Technical Prioritization Communication: Work closely with the development team to understand the technical prioritization of stories and articulate those back to all key stakeholders.
  • Work Stream Management: Provide the development team with a consistent stream of well-prioritized work.
  • Commitment and Requirement Evaluation: Question unrealistic commitment and requirements.
  • Decision-Making and Ideation Balance: Get the right balance between decisiveness and ideation.
  • Customer Interaction and Insight Gathering: Love speaking to customers to understand their needs and wants for the products.
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