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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