Product Owner

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

– Agile Manifesto [1]

Definition: The Product Owner (PO) is the Agile team member primarily responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the team by ensuring that the team backlog is aligned with customer and stakeholder needs.

What is a Product Owner in SAFe?

The PO is the ‘voice of the customer’ on the AgileTeam, representing the needs of end-users and the business. An effective PO manages relationships, synthesizes data, maintains business alignment in the team backlog, and communicates with various stakeholders. Their goal is to obtain insights and deliver results quickly. Together with Product Management, they ensure that product strategy and implementation remain connected across teams. For most organizations moving to Agile, this is a new, full-time role for each Agile Team.

Product Owners play a crucial role in SAFe. Each PO acts as a bridge between an Agile Team and its customers. They represent differing views and decide what the most important work to complete is to reach business goals. By managing the backlog, gathering feedback, and promoting teamwork, the PO enhances communication and keeps the team focused on the highest-value work. This leads to better outcomes for the organization.

What are the Product Owner’s responsibilities?

The PO’s responsibilities typically fall into five areas, as shown in Figure 1.

Each of these is described in the sections below.

Connecting with the customer

Ensuring that Agile Release Trains (ARTs) build the right things in the right way is a constant process. Product strategy, design, and implementation must evolve with customer desires and business needs. Partnering with Product Management, the PO guides the ART toward delivering desirable and sustainable solutions. The PO applies customer centricity and design thinking in the following ways:

Develop whole-product solutions – Solutions that address a range of customer needs are more valuable than those targeting a single need. POs aim to deliver whole-product solutions by understanding the desired customer experience. They guide the development of initial designs through the Lean UX process to deliver tested concepts that maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Know the customer – The customer determines value, so the PO is sensitive to their needs. Customers may be internal or external to the company and may have direct or indirect relationships with the PO. Whether customers use products, services, systems, APIs, platforms, or other solutions, POs continually explore their wants, needs, and preferences.

Know the stakeholders – Product design and implementation requirements also reflect the needs of non-customer stakeholders. Business Owners, Portfolio Leadership, Product Management, System Architects, and fellow POs also rely on the cadence and quality of the team’s output. The PO identifies these key stakeholders and balances their needs with the customers’.

Identify the problem to be solved – Good products solve problems worth solving. The first step in design thinking is identifying which problems customers are most interested in solving. Applying divergent thinking, the PO discovers a range of customer needs. Then, they identify the ‘jobs to be done’ that are most worth pursuing.

Contributing to the vision and roadmap

While Product Management contemplates the solutions and experiences an ART should deliver, POs understand what solutions and experiences the ART can provide. Their practical insight is invaluable to the vision and roadmaps that guide solution implementation. The PO applies their knowledge in these ways:

• Understand market forces – Market rhythms and events, sudden opportunities, competitive threats, and changing regulations influence product strategy. POs regularly engage with Product Management to analyze market research and understand the business drivers that trigger feature requests.
• Represent the end user –POs connect to the needs and experiences of product end users through frequent interviews, Gemba, and reporting. Understanding how potential customers engage with solutions and their desired features is essential to confirm that the vision and roadmap have real value.
• Assist with ART backlog prioritization – POs guide the sequencing of features to achieve the best economic outcomes. They collaborate with Product Management, System Architects, Release Train Engineers (RTEs), and other stakeholders. This ensures the ART Backlog reflects a vision and roadmap to address which problems need solutions, which solutions would best solve them, and the likelihood of delivering them.
• Educate the ART during PI Planning – The vision and the roadmap are living artifacts. ARTs create and adjust them to align with business and technical strategy. The PO helps communicate the vision and roadmap during PI Planning to prepare teams to execute against them, keeping a portion of the work in scope to implement.

Managing and prioritizing the team backlog

The Product Owner (PO) is responsible for maintaining the content and the team’s backlog’s conceptual and technical integrity. This backlog includes user stories, enablers, and defects, and it should always be populated with work ready for the team to execute. The PO gathers input from Product Management, System Architects, and other stakeholders to ensure the backlog aligns with their needs. The PO maintains the backlog’s integrity through these activities:

• Guide story creation – Any team member can write stories, but the Product Owner (PO) ensures they are clear and fit the product strategy. The PO helps break stories into smaller parts, clarifies details, and applies a user-friendly voice. To keep delivering value, the PO uses behavior-driven development (BDD) and defines enablers. POs also create space for local stories and spikes to help improve product design. These may not result directly from the primary features of the Agile Release Train (ART).
• Prioritize backlog items – Continuous value flow occurs when the highest-value backlog items are delivered in the shortest sustainable lead time and the proper sequence. The PO guides this by regularly ranking backlog items based on their Cost of Delay (CoD). They share the prioritized backlog with the team during backlog refinement and Iteration Planning.
• Accept stories – The PO works with the team to accept completed stories. This includes confirming that the story meets approved standards, has the necessary acceptance tests, and complies with its definition of done (DoD). This assures that quality is built in.
• Support architectural runway – Although POs don’t typically drive technological decisions, they make space in the backlog to implement the architectural runway. Collaborating with System Architects, they craft enablers and work with stakeholders to establish appropriate capacity allocations.

Supporting the Agile Team in delivering value

To create value, Agile teams pull from the backlog, implement stories, integrate and test changes, and deliver a solution increment. Most of this happens during the iteration. As a member of the Agile Team and primary customer proxy, the PO provides daily insights that guide development toward high-value outputs and the team toward iteration goals. This permits the team and the ART to deliver value continuously.

• Balance stakeholder perspectives – Product Owners (POs) get feedback from customers, stakeholders, and teams. They also receive data from research tools. This information can validate or challenge implementation decisions. These sources can also provide conflicting information. POs manage differing perspectives by understanding the underlying needs that drive them. While remaining customer-centric, they respect capacity allocations, evaluate the CoD, and collaborate with stakeholders and teams to reach decisions leading to favorable outcomes.
• Elaborate stories – Typically, stories are created before iteration execution but require ongoing elaboration. POs facilitate frequent team conversations to resolve questions, manage dependencies, and communicate emerging priorities as stories are implemented. This information also helps the team slice stories to increase velocity and shorten learning cycles.
• Foster built-in quality – The PO represents the team’s customers and stakeholders. The PO looks at the value being delivered from the backlog. They regularly check progress toward meeting story acceptance criteria and ensure that quality standards, like the definition of done (DoD) and nonfunctional requirements (NFRs), are met. The PO collaborates closely with the team to identify and fix quality issues as they arise.
• Participate in team and ART events – As a member of the Agile Team, the PO attends and participates in team events during PI execution. The PO offers feedback from the customer’s perspective on the team’s work during iteration planning, backlog refinement, iteration reviews, team retrospectives, and team syncs. The PO’s participation helps them satisfy dependencies, demonstrate incremental value, and maintain cadence with the ART.

Getting and applying feedback

The PO is responsible for maximizing the value an Agile team produces. This implies that the value is known. However, that knowledge comes from frequent customer and stakeholder feedback. This occurs at delivery and throughout the product development life cycle. The PO is critical to fostering the feedback loops that fuel the value stream. They study quantitative and qualitative insights to learn whether solutions provide real value. The following actions help the PO gather and apply feedback from several sources:

• Test benefit assumptions – Value can only be realized when the customer uses a working solution. And even then, it’s uncertain. During development, the real value is unknown. To lessen the risk of delivering low-value solutions, the PO collaborates with Product Management to develop benefit assumptions based on customer and market knowledge. Once implemented, the solution value is validated or nullified by feedback the PO gathers from customers and stakeholders throughout the product life cycle.
• Obtain feedback from customers and stakeholders – Customers get value by using delivered solutions. Their feedback indicates how well the solutions met their needs, which drives adoption and loyalty. Stakeholders gain value from solutions through increased revenue, cost savings, or decreased customer risk. POs gather this feedback through empathy interviews, Gemba walks, iteration reviews, and system demos. They also receive it indirectly from application telemetry, analytics, financial reporting, and secondary market data.
• Share feedback with the ART – Solution delivery requires coordination and synchronization across the value stream. The PO is a large part of this, sharing their thoughts with different teams and roles across the ART as needed. The PO aligns with Product Management and System Architects as part of the continuous exploration practice. POs share feedback and insights with each other during the PO Sync. Backlog refinement, Iteration Planning, and Iteration Reviews are events within each Agile Team dedicated to sharing and acting upon feedback. The entire ART learns more during PI Planning, System Demos, and, if applicable, I&A events.
• Evolve solution design – Frequent, customer-centric feedback informs the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle. This practice enables continuous value delivery and relentless improvement of the value stream. By gathering and sharing critical insights, the PO sustains the constant refinement of the product vision, roadmap, strategy, and design. This creates optimum business value.

Who does the Product Owner partner with?

The PO is responsible for maximizing the value the Agile Team delivers. However, the PO cannot accomplish this alone.

Building the right solutions requires understanding business strategy, customer segmentation, market dynamics, and value stream economics. To gain these insights and apply them to product domains, the PO partners with Product Management. Building solutions the right way also requires technical agility, DevOps practices, and a continuous delivery pipeline (CDP). These capabilities determine the speed and quality of value delivery, and the PO relies on the Agile Team to provide them.

The PO is a critical link in the flow of information between Product Management and the Agile Team. As shown in Figure 2, the PO keeps the Agile Team informed about the strategy that influenced the product design. They also keep Product Management informed regarding the innovations that influence the delivery of that strategy. Customer feedback aligns thinking from strategy through execution and is accessible to everyone involved.

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References

[1] Manifesto for Agile Software Development. http://AgileManifesto.org/