Being an Effective Product Owner in Scrum

In today’s class we are going to learn about role of Product Owner in Scrum. There are three primary roles in the Agile project management Scrum method: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, Team

Working in the Scrum usually the Product owner (PO) is the project’s key stakeholder. The Product Owner is the key person to successfully start any agile software development project. S/he has the overall vision of the product what business is looking for and conveys the Vision and Goals at the beginning of every Release and Sprint to Scrum team.

Basically we can say that “The agile product owner is a Unicorn.”

The Product Owner is the voice of the customer and the person conveying the vision to team members & aligns the work in the product backlog (feature list). The Product Owner talks with team directly while visually representing the tasks in backlog and ensure that product backlog is visible to all team members and stakeholders. Based on the business requirements the Product Owner prioritizes tasks.

Before starting every Sprint the Scrum Product Owner and the team meet together to decide what all work will to attempt in the Sprint and create a definition of done, in agreement with the development team. With the whole team Product Owner should take part in Sprint Planning and Sprint Review meetings.

The team is responsible to update product owner about any impediments if any to complete the Sprint deliverables, meanwhile, the product owner should understand the velocity of the team and based on that s/he should decide how much can be brought about in a single sprint. As the product owner understand the vision of the product, so product owner should guide the team on a regular basis to answer the question and clarify the acceptance criteria of tasks. Once the Sprint is started and tasks are assigned to the team then the team must be given the whole of the sprint to accomplish the Sprint task without disruption. The product owner should not force additional tasks to be done in a sprint. The Product Owner must resist “raiding the team’s sprint.” The Scrum product owner cannot modify the current sprint task until the next sprint planning meeting.

At the end of the, every sprint demo should be conducted to show all current sprint deliverables. The Product Owner must take a look over the progress of each task & accept or reject the work done in the sprint based on the acceptance criteria or definition of done. If any task is rejected then it should be re-prioritized by the product owner again in the product backlog and need to complete in upcoming sprints based on the priority of the task.

The Agile Product Owner should be confident in making business decisions because the Product owner is the person who is responsible for the success or failure of the project. So Product owner responsible for product profitability (ROI) and should not be scared to make tough decisions. Before taking the decisions Product owner must think first about the business requirement and expectations of stakeholders. If any drastic change in the requirement in which works is being done in the current sprint then Product Owner has the authority to terminate the Sprint.

If you want to read more on agile project management then you can get in our previous Top 20 Best Agile Development Books article where we have listed a few top books related to Agile development.

If you worked on the Scrum method & if you think more roles & responsibilities of the Product owner and have some tips to share, please do it in below comment section.

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