The business universe is full of ideas and their implementations. No business in the history of mankind has become a vanguard without proper execution by those who portended the far-stretched future of possibilities filled with uncertainty. While facing the storms of challenges, all of the business owners had ideas that kept them standing their ground, foreseeing a whole new world of possibilities where their product is being sought by consumers.
In this context, the Product Owner Role is crucial, guiding the vision from inception to realization. The product owner’s responsibilities include aligning the product with business goals, prioritizing features, and ensuring value delivery to customers. There are also different types of product owners, each bringing unique strengths and approaches to the table. Understanding these aspects not only supports effective execution but also helps businesses build a strong foundation for sustained success.
The Product Owner is also a project’s key stakeholder who is responsible for shaping the outcome of a project. Equipped with a clear vision of the product to be created, the Product Owner communicates this vision to the team, setting milestones to guide the product’s journey from ideas to implementation and, finally, to launch. Understanding the Product Owner Role is essential, as it encompasses both the strategic alignment of the product with business goals and the tactical execution to achieve them.
In this article, we will explore the types of product owners, explaining how their roles differ and relate to one another, as well as how to apply them effectively for optimal results.
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The Product Owner role is an integral part of agile development, more categorically, a role within a Scrum team. There are multiple types of product owners in the industry. These types are determined by the responsibilities owned by these Product Owners towards the product. To understand these types, let us first understand the responsibilities.
Product Owner Responsibilities
The Product Owner is directly accountable for augmenting the value of the product ensuing from the work of the Scrum Team. As the liaison and face of the user, the Product Owner not only understands the core of the product but also advocates for the user’s perspective. Among the key product owners responsibilities are helping the team assess risks, considering the latest available technology, and making trade-offs with budget and time in mind. The Product Owner is responsible for:
- Defining The Product Vision – Being the face of the user, a Product Owner is expected to envisage the product vision so that the development team can conceptualize the user needs and the expected outcomes of a product.
- Developing And Explicitly Communicating the Product Goal – Product Owners become the experts and guardians of the Product, define its goal, and facilitate communications, ensuring every team member is on the same page.
- Managing The Product Backlog – In an agile world, since the requirements are dynamic, the product backlog items might require frequent movements to accommodate constantly changing priorities. Hence, the crucial responsibility of a Product Owner is product backlog management. This responsibility encompasses the following:
- Creating and disseminating vital information on Product Backlog items
- Prioritizing and stacking Product Backlog items
- Confirming that the Product Backlog is well defined, transparent, and clear
Despite clearly defined responsibilities, the Product Owner role is still riddled with misunderstandings. It’s not infrequent to meet someone who is a Product Owner, yet does not own the entire product but only some product details or a few features. In parallel, one may often encounter types of product owners who are managing an entire portfolio of products rather than owning or managing just one. In some organizations, the ‘Project Managers’ from the Waterfall approach became Product Owners when the approach changed to agile; and in some places, business analysts are referred to as Product Owners. Again, in a few recently turned Agile firms, Product Owners are rather designated as product managers (perhaps to latch on to the word ‘manager’ since the owner might seem a demotion) although product manager is another function beyond and above product owner.
The Product Owner has multiple product owners responsibilities, including market study, research, strategic planning, product operations, and post-launch analysis. One major reason for confusion around the Product Owner role is a common misconception: the Product Owner is a role, not a designation. This role is assigned to someone managing a project, product, or portfolio in a company, but it does not define a specific job title. Unless the distinction between the role and job designation is clearly understood, this confusion will likely persist.
Role Of Project Owner in Start Up
In a start-up, the Product Owner might have all of these responsibilities; and in all practical senses, they might be doing the role of a Product Manager. But when you scale the company, the teams, and the stakeholders, the role of a Product Owner tends to digress from what they are supposed to do. As the teams grow and do a mixture of Agile with Waterfall or other techniques, the Product Owner starts losing responsibilities as well as the power to make business decisions that benefit the customer, and their focus shifts much more to stakeholder management, cross-team dependencies, and managing their team’s backlog. This is quite similar to the Product Management Role.
The Product Owner role is relevant only within the scrum. If you’re taking scrum and agile out of your development process then the role of the Product Owner doesn’t exist. So, If you are a Product Manager and your team is using scrum, you are most likely also a Product Owner. If your team is not using Scrum or any other agile framework, you are still a Product or Project Manager. The Product Manager’s job does not lean on scrum, but the ROLE of a Product Owner does depend on scrum.
This raises questions such as,
“Can one be a Product Owner and not a Project Manager?”
- In agile environment, Product Owner is a role, not a designated job. If you’re working on various projects for a product’s growth, you can have a designation as project Manager but your role will still be of a Product owner in agile. Also, project managers in waterfall approach are not same as product owners in agile as the roles and responsibilities of both are quite distinct. One must avoid using them interchangeably.
“Is it possible to be a Product Owner then switch to being a Product Manager?”
- Yes, in the concrete, you can be anything else and then become a Product Manager. Being a Product Owner equips you with exposure and experience in managing backlogs, customer requests, and working with development teams. It is just one of the many ways that you can get into Product Management.
In my experience as a Product Owner, I have mostly come across various roles that a Product Owner does in his/her organizations; some of which are true to their definition while some are not.
Types Of Product Owners
Let’s look at the difference in types of product owners and roles as well as how closely they are related. The salient difference will help everyone to reflect on which bracket they hold by and how constructively they can apply the knowledge in their respective areas of work.
Scrum Product Owner
This is the original role. He/she owns the product, an asset that creates value for a group of users and business, in its entirety and is responsible for maximizing the value that the product creates. The phrase “owning the product in its entirety” is the key here. To understand it better, we can consider an analogy of a “news mobile app”. The app is a product whereas the ability to log in, read a news article, search a piece of news, and successfully navigate from one article to another is the various features in the app. A Scrum Product Owner will own the entire news app inclusive of all its features and not just one of its features. When a person lacks ownership and management of the complete product, referring to him/her as a Product Owner is incorrect for the following reasons:
- When someone owns just a part of the product, he/she cannot maximize the product’s value or achieve the product’s vision since he/she may not be responsible for the same. Their area of expertise is just a feature in the product and not the overall product on its own.
- The individual who handles only a feature or a group of features in a product lacks both the decision-making authority as well as skillsets.
You may also like our latest blog related to Product Owner vs Business Analyst vs Scrum Master, click on the link, and explore other areas of Agile.
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Feature Owner
We may have rarely come across such a role or designation, yet there are many types of Product Owners who take on a feature owner role, even if they aren’t formally recognized as such. The Product Owner Role can vary widely; for example, in my organization, a Product Owner leads a team of feature owners. These feature owners are responsible for maximizing the value of their respective features while ensuring they contribute positively to the overall value creation of the product. This approach highlights the flexibility and depth of the Product Owner
role in driving product success
I find it a good technique and the reason is simple: each of these feature owners, while describing their functionality, interacting with development teams, researching the market conditions, discovering the best tactics for that feature’s growth, and evaluating data & feedback ensures that each feature gets equal importance and have a competitive advantage. They are collaboratively enhancing or creating a larger product as members of a product team. All these feature owners are led by the Scrum Product Owner who oversees their work, guides them to make the right product decisions, the right product strategy, and also ensures that all their work fits fine in an actionable roadmap envisioned by him/her.
Similar to the feature-owner role, there may be another role focused on an architectural building block, such as a user interface layer, APIs, or a service requiring in-depth technical expertise. Since they are not responsible for a specific feature but rather a component that impacts multiple features or serves as a foundational service layer, these individuals can be termed as Component Owners. They are part of the same Product team and are led by the Scrum Product Owner. The Product Owner Role encompasses overseeing both Feature Owners and Component Owners, guiding them to maximize the value of their respective components within the broader product strategy.
Platform and Portfolio Owners
As there are Component Owners, there are owners of a Platform too. A platform is a collection of digital assets used by several products. For example, Microsoft suite is a platform (collection of products), and each of MS Word, MS Excel, MS Outlook are its products. The core responsibility of a Platform Owner is the same as the Scrum Product Owner with a key difference; instead of managing a product, he/she owns the platform by maximizing the value that the platform devises such as narrowing the time-to-market as well as the development cost of the products built on it. Basically, for a Platform Owner, the platform managed by him can be considered as the product. The Platform Owner must be technically adept on the platform, to communicate effectively with the users that are the members of the product team who build their products using the platform.
Portfolio Owners
Just like platform owners, there is a separate role that can be termed as the Portfolio Owners. These owners have a bigger responsibility of managing not only a product but also a group of them due to which they are commonly called Product Portfolio Manager. Their role requires them to not only actively manage the portfolio but also collaborate with the Product Owners who manage the products within the portfolio. Since they are responsible for a group of products, they have to ensure that the individual product strategies and the roadmaps are in sync and a common user experience is generated across various products.
This entails handling dependencies, aligning major releases, not muddling up priorities, and not giving importance to one product over the other. Anyone who carries the beneficial experience and exposure of having managed individual products can step up to this role. Often a senior Product Manager or Owner is suitable to manage a group of similar products catering to different users. Portfolio Owner has bigger responsibilities. One can relate a portfolio manager to a Program Manager at a large size business organization. For small to mid-size organizations usually, the CEO or managing directors play this role.
SAFe Product Owner
While all the roles discussed so far are connected to the types of product owners like Scrum Product Owner, the SAFe Product Owners are quite distinct. SAFe is a framework used in scaled agile projects and is practiced at the enterprise level. As per the Agile scaling framework, the SAFe Product Owners do not look after the entire product but only the tactical part of it such as defining the product details, user stories, and interacting with one or more development teams.
They are NOT focused on the enactment of the product strategies which are defined by another role called SAFe Product Manager. So, the full heap product ownership is bifurcated into – strategic and tactics – The SAFe Product Owners deal with the tactic maneuvers while the SAFe Product Managers are adroit in their role. This role-splitting action works best when the product is stable but may lack efficiency when the product is in its budding stage. The reason is this: when there are uncertainties that affect the product strategies, having another role to manage the tactics will not lead to an efficient outcome. In this case, having an individual own the product and develop it from scratch i.e., from the product’s vision to its mission is recommended.
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Conclusion
Each role described above is part of the broader product management scope, and anyone performing any one of these roles takes on a level of ownership. No role is superior or inferior to another; each is rewarding and invigorating in its own way. The primary difference lies in the ownership scope and the specific skills required to ensure success. The Product Owner Role and the various product owner responsibilities offer a valuable opportunity to create impact, providing value both to users and the business. What truly matters isn’t job titles but the value we bring to users and businesses. Ultimately, every product role is pursued with the goal of building the best possible product for users and driving positive outcomes for the organization.
