Mike Lyons explains what a Product Owner actually does in Scrum: maximize value, represent customers, manage the backlog, communicate vision, handle stakeholders, and accept finished work. The role works only if one person has real authority and the team trusts their decisions.
When I worked in local government in Colorado a number of years ago, I actually was a product owner for a website. And I remember learning that role sort of the hard way, like on the fly, you know, just jumping in and trying to figure it out with a new Scrum team that was forming. And I learned a lot, but I learned it the hard way. And I'm hopeful that my experience as a product owner will help inform you of what to expect and not expect in this critical role. The product owner. Typically described as the voice of the customer, the product owner really is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and providing customer feedback and input for the Scrum team. Empowered product owners are crucial to success. And as a member of the team, the entire organization should respect their decisions. These decisions, they're not really made in a vacuum. No, they're, they're highly visible. Highly visible in the product backlog. Visible as demonstrated completed work each sprint demonstrated in the Sprint review. Another key element of product owner is around managing stakeholder expectations. They say no a lot, not because they're like mean, but because they're the final word on the priority of the work that the teams perform. And they have to really understand their customers and, and sometimes they have to push back on things that aren't directly related to releasing the next most important thing. Not every idea is a good idea, even if a senior executive thinks so. Product owners have many other responsibilities, including communicating the product vision. To like everybody, the teams, stakeholders, really everyone needs to understand the product vision and that's part of the product owner responsibility as well. Additionally, product owners create and maintain and make highly visible the product backlog. A backlog, it's just a list of all the things we might do for the product. The product owner clarifies that product backlog information for the teams and accepts the work that the teams submit and perform each sprint. Now, just one final word on product owner. The product owner is a single person and there's only one of them on each team. This is not a committee, this is not a review board or a phase gate. And product owners might represent the needs of many, many stakeholders, but they do so in a highly visible product backlog. And look, those wanting to change the product backlog in the order people can do that, but they do that by trying to convince the product owner of what's important for the product owner. A critical role on the Scrum team.
