My years at CloudCraze Software, my other personal experiences, and dozens of conversations with students and agile practitioners confirm that the product owner (PO) role can make or break an agile project or team. An effective PO keeps things moving and ensures that the team is focused on work of highest business value. An ineffective PO is a tremendous impediment and can single-handedly reduce a team’s velocity to a crawl, damage morale, and mute the effectiveness of an agile implementation or project.
The most frequent issue with a product owner is that the team is impeded waiting for input or decisions from the product owner.
The product owner ensures agile project teams are focused on highest value outcomes during their sprints and release cycles. The product owner works with the team constantly to refine the backlog and answer questions as the team works to deliver on their commitments. The product owner also works with the team to consider the impact of user story and task dependencies as well as technical risk that impacts the delivery of work during sprints.
To perform well in this role, the product owner must fully understand the needs and wants of their customers. This role must also be available and accessible to the project team so that the agile team never waits for feedback or decisions. This role must deeply understand the key drivers of the business and emphasize these throughout the project to ensure consistent delivery of value. This role is so important that there is dedicated training and specific certification (e.g., Certified Scrum Product Owner) for the PO role.
In the words of one practitioner, the product owner can “make, break or impede” the agile team. If the product owner doesn’t fulfill responsibilities to the team and the overall business, the negative impact shows up in a number of ways. Most frequently, the issue is that the team is held up waiting for product owner feedback or decisions. The fast pace of an agile team and project during 2- to 4-week sprints means that waiting for product owner input slows the team and reduces delivery of their commitments during that timeframe.
Another common consequence from a poorly performing product owner is a team focused on work items of lower priority or business value instead of deliverables of higher value to the company. This could happen because the product owner is not available or has not prioritized the backlog of work, and so the team spends their time on low-value work such as fixing noncritical defects. This could also happen if an unprepared product owner provides incorrect prioritization to a team because they are not clear on how the outcome will generate value.
These are just two examples. The product owner role is extremely important to successful agile project execution. As more organizations gain experience using agile, it becomes increasingly clear how impactful it is when this role is not performed well.
They are knowledgeable – They must really understand the fundamentals of the business and the necessary outcomes as well as how they will provide value to customers.
They are committed – They have a stake in the outcome and so will be fully committed, just like the team.
They are available – They are not so distracted by other duties that they cannot properly perform the responsibilities of the product owner role.
Ensuring these three key criteria are met will help an organization select product owners who can contribute to high-performing teams and projects.
Product Owner Responsibilities
Successful performance in the product owner role starts with a clear understanding of the responsibilities of this critical role. An in-depth knowledge of the functions performed by a product owner can help drive agile projects to success and guide teams to maximize value delivery.
Project Inception
During project inception, the product owner plays a critical role in setting a common vision for the project. Some organizations prefer to create a document called a project inception deck. The product owner will lead creation of this critical document which captures the project vision, including what will be in scope, out of scope, and overall project expectations. The product owner then shares the inception deck with the project team, so they have the vision to refer to when planning their release work and ensuring it aligns with the vision as it plans its work during each sprint. By working with project stakeholders such as product managers at the inception of a project, product owners can create an inception deck that sets a common vision for the project that will be critical for maintaining focus throughout the entire project life cycle.
Backlog Grooming
The product owner is the owner of the product backlog and has primary responsibility for grooming the backlog. “Grooming the backlog” means prioritizing the items on the backlog, adding new items when necessary, removing items that are no longer of value, and constantly refining the definition of the items on the backlog. This ensures that the agile project team has a steady flow of valuable and prioritized items that they continuously work on from sprint to sprint and throughout the entire project life cycle.
The product owner adds new items to the backlog based on his or her knowledge of customer needs gained by being in constant contact and communication with product managers, customers, or other stakeholders. The PO removes features and backlog items which, based on these conversations, are no longer valuable. The PO reviews the project team’s progress and, based on this progress as well as knowledge of customer priorities, regularly adjusts the order and priority of backlog items. This ensures that the team is working on items that are of the highest value to customers and the company as a whole.
Sprint Planning and Sprint Review
Product owners have several critical functions that they perform during sprints. They assist with sprint planning, ensuring that their knowledge of the overall product backlog gets the highest business value items added to the sprint backlog. Product owners are also expected to be consistently available to the agile team to provide guidance, answer questions, and ensure that the team is never impeded due to lack of direction or because they are waiting for an important question about a future or backlog items to be answered. By doing this, the PO ensures that customer-facing value features are completed and can be released so that the team delivers rapid and consistent value to the company.
During the sprint review, the product owner has several critical functions. The agile team has been working to complete sprint backlog items and has likely completed several features and components. At the sprint review demo, the product owner is responsible to decide if those items have been completed in a way that meets the definition of done and that deliver increments of product value or functionality as necessary to meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.
The PO should be present at all demos delivered by the agile team. In addition to seeing the work that the team has completed and having the opportunity to review, accept, or reject this work, the PO knows it is a critical opportunity to provide constructive feedback and encouragement to the agile team. The PO can also remind the team of the product vision and make the connection between each new feature and how customers will find value.
Value Realization
Agile is focused on achieving rapid value realization by delivering releasable deliverables on a regular cadence. The accumulated work of several sprints should result in a releasable product. It is up to the product owner to be thinking about and ultimately decide when the increments of product or project deliverables are ready to be released, thus providing their value to the organization and its customers.
An effective PO takes this responsibility very seriously not only during release and sprint planning but also periodically during the agile project life cycle by thinking about opportunities to deliver value to customers. The PO works with the agile team to ensure that sprint and release planning as well as completed sprints result in frequent release providing value to the organization and customers.
Product Owner Relationships
In agile environments, product owners work closely with customers, agile teams, stakeholders, and scrum masters. They must develop and maintain these key relationships to function effectively and fulfill their key responsibilities. They are required to constantly connect with these people to ensure that the project work meets the expectations and delivers value. Inability to collaborate with them can negatively impact the customer relationship, internal teams, and the organization.
A product owner must work closely, constantly, and consistently with stakeholders inside and outside of the organization as necessary to maintain a constant and intimate familiarity with their needs and interests. This is necessary so that the product owner can groom the backlog, prioritize, and provide guidance to the agile project team based on this always up-to-date knowledge.
Product owners must cultivate relationships with people within their organization who influence the projects they work on. In practice, this may mean meeting them regularly for coffee or lunch, attending their meetings, listening to their discussions and concerns. This also involves doing research themselves and maintaining a constant understanding of customers and the organization’s needs and interests.
These stakeholders must feel a trust in product owners and know that they proactively work to maintain constant knowledge of their customers and their interests and know that they will use their knowledge and trust to prioritize work for completion throughout the release, during each sprint, and to provide constant guidance to the team as they work.
The Team, Sprint Planning, and Value Realization
Product owners use the customer and stakeholder knowledge that they accumulate to maintain another critical relationship with agile teams as they perform sprint planning. Product owners are responsible for creating a good working relationship based on mutual trust with scrum masters and the agile teams to develop and prioritize a sprint backlog and to negotiate with the team to finalize the goals and outcomes for each sprint.
Once these goals are established, product owners protect their teams from people who want to add additional work to the in-flight sprint and ensure that changing priorities are not allowed to impact the sprint commitment. They also ensure that the sprints are planned and completed in such a way that the release plan produces coherent, valuable, and releasable product increments on a regular basis.
One of the most important things product owners are responsible for is to help the agile team meet their sprint commitments by using their knowledge of the needs and interests of stakeholders and customers to provide guidance to the agile team during sprints. This relationship is critically important during the in-flight sprints so that the team never waits for information. Through this relationship, product owners share their knowledge and function as a daily resource to the team by answering its questions, providing in-the-moment feedback on deliverables to ensure it meets the intent of the user stories and creates the value expected by customers, stakeholders, and the organization.
Product Owner Relationship Issues
If a PO fails to maintain relationships with customers, stakeholders, and their teams, this will have significant negative impacts to the agile project and team. If product owners do not engage with stakeholders and stay current with developments, they cannot effectively apply this knowledge when grooming their backlogs. A poorly informed or uninformed PO offers no value to the team’s planning work or offers incorrect information which could cause the team to work on features and stories of lesser value.
Product owners who fail to create strong relationships with their agile teams are not able to provide them with needed guidance or protect them from additional work during sprints. This in turn can delay or derail sprints and overall project outcomes due to this missing relationship.
Impacts of Product Owner Performance
A product owner’s performance has a significant impact on the work of the agile team and its ability to deliver value, as well as the overall outcomes of the projects and products the organization wants to deliver. Effective product owners can add lift to their teams and organizations while ineffective POs become impediments to their teams and their organizations. Product owners should be experienced in their business and organization and receive specialized training in the responsibilities of product ownership in agile frameworks and environments.
Common Product Owner Failures
- 1.
Failure to lead on backlog grooming
- 2.
Failure to maintain good and consistent customer and stakeholder relationships
- 3.
Failure to be readily available to the team to provide critical information, direction, and feedback
- 4.
Failure to be alert for and recognize when completed increments of product could result in readiness to release product or deploy new functionality to production
Effective and Ineffective Product Owner Behaviors
Effective product owners lead and own backlog grooming which means that the agile team has a steady flow of well-formed and prioritized items to bring into sprint planning resulting in on-time and effective sprints. On the other hand, product owners who do not perform this role effectively have a disorganized backlog. Their team does not have ready and well-formed stories for their sprint plans resulting in late sprints or poorly planned sprints.
Product owners who are readily available help their teams move forward without being impeded for lack of information. When product owners are absent or hard to reach, they create impediments for their teams, and the work of these teams suffers.
Product owners who maintain good relationships with customers and stakeholders have up-to-date knowledge needed to groom the backlog and provide in-sprint guidance. When this is not done, the backlog and the team suffer.
When the product owner is closely monitoring progress and completion of work in sprints and in aggregate during a release cycle, they can determine when it is appropriate to release a product or deploy to production. By contrast, a product owner who does not do this may miss opportunities to deliver value to the organization.
How Ineffective Product Owners Impact Agile Projects
When product owners do not groom the backlog properly, it means that the projects will not be focused on the highest business value items. It means that items in the backlog may not be very well defined, which in turn means that they may not be properly executed in the project. When a product owner is not engaged with customers and stakeholders, he/she cannot represent their interests properly which means that the project itself will not deliver outcomes that are aligned with the needs and interests of these customers and stakeholders.
When product owners are not available to the project team, the team is impeded in their work and the project itself can stall.
It is important to remember that a core tenet of agile project management is rapid and consistent value realization. The product owner’s engagement is critical to make this happen, so when product owners are not engaged, they miss opportunities to release product or deploy new features and functionality to production, thus missing opportunities to deliver value to the organization rapidly and consistently.
Summary
The product owner role is a critical individual role in agile project management. Agile teams rely on this role to know the needs and interests of customers and stakeholders and to be able to translate these into backlog items. Further, agile teams rely on the product owner to groom the backlog, constantly refine the understanding of the backlog items, and extract the most valuable backlog items to bring into sprint planning.
Agile teams expect the product owner to be available to them during sprints and to help determine when backlog items are done and ready to deliver value to the organization and its customers. Effective performance of this role is critical to the success of agile teams and projects, but if the role is performed ineffectively, the negative impacts on the project and teams are many.
Familiarity with the responsibilities of a product owner, the key relationships that they should maintain, and the impacts of effective and ineffective behaviors can help aspiring product owners perform this role successfully and make important contributions to agile teams and projects in their organization.
In Chapter 9, we will discuss the agile coach. We will see how an agile coach helps organizations identify and act in opportunities to improve the performance of agile teams and team members. The agile coach can be particularly helpful to the scrum master, product owner, and senior leaders in agile and hybrid environments.