Joakim Karlsson

It’s not easy being a product owner. For a lot of you out there it’s a lonely job. It’s also a job that brings with it a lot of responsibility. You are responsible for the vision and the profitability of the product.

That’s not something to be taken lightly.

A recent discussion on the Scrum Development List on whether it was advisable to have more than one product owner on a project or not, got me thinking. The prevalent view seems to be that there should only be one product owner. What is required of that person?

Vision

As a PO, you are responsible for the product vision and for making sure that it’s communicated to all project stakeholders.

Balance

A big part of it is about balance. You have to balance the demands from the other stakeholders:

• Different customers have different ideas about what absolutely has to be in the product – now!
• The team requests to work on esoteric parts of the system that won’t result in any visible new functionality, otherwise all development will come to a complete stop any day now
• Your own organization holds you accountable for releasing something that generates revenue – ASAP!

Answers

You’re also supposed to be able to answer questions ranging from minute details about how the users want their data displayed, and whether the credit card payment functionality has higher priority than switching to version 5.2 of the OR-mapper (whatever that is), to answering the more general question from management “So, how’s that project of yours coming along?”.

So, either you put on your superhero costume, cape and all, and do it all yourself, or you better start finding ways to collaborate with the people around you.

There Can Be Only One?

When an organization is at the beginning of introducing agile software development, it might be a good idea to have one product owner. Chances are that the constraint of the organization is the team’s ability to use the agile engineering practices.

But as the team gets more experience, it will eventually cease to be the constraint. It is highly likely that the new constraint is the single product owner.

That’s when you need to review the responsibilities of your PO. Which are the core ones? Can some of the non-core responsibilities be delegated to someone else?

Perhaps you’ll find that your PO has more responsibilities than can be handled by one person.

For another perspective on the product owner role, you might wanna check out Rich Mironov’s article, Revenue Products need Product Managers, not Product Owners