How does a Product Owner influence software development?

Contents: 

• The link between the client and the developers. Who is a Product Owner?
• What do they do?
• What skills do you need to develop for the job?
• How to become a Product Owner?

The link between the customer and the developers. Who is a Product Owner?

A Product Owner (PO) translates as "product owner." This specialist represents the client's interests during the development of an application or website. They understand the features the product should have and help the team implement them. Sometimes the Product Owner is the client themselves or a designated representative. However, in modern teams that adhere to the principles of agile development and work using the Scrum methodology, there is a separate specialist who takes responsibility for the result.

Customer involvement is a key feature of agile development methods, including Scrum. The Product Owner acts as the liaison between the client and the developers. Throughout the project, they constantly interact with the client and guide the team. One of his tasks is to understand how the business works, what problems arise, and to figure out what tasks the developed product should solve.

"Product Owner" is responsible for:

• The value of the product for business. He needs to be both a marketer and a business analyst to understand the expectations of the audience and the entrepreneur, to figure out which features will be useful in an application or on a website, and which will only complicate the interface.
• A unified vision of the project within the team. The product owner, together with the developers, selects technical methods and tools for the implementation of the product within the budget and deadlines. It synchronizes the work of all specialists: coders, layout designers, testers.
• Roadmap and backlog (edit: a regularly updated list of tasks for developers). The specialist distributes tasks, prioritizes tasks, defines short-term goals (Product Goals), and monitors their implementation.

On the one hand, the product owner ensures that the benefits of product implementation exceed the development costs. On the other hand, they are the generator of ideas. They put forward proposals for how to develop the project, help formulate tasks, and distribute them among team members. The final product and its success largely depend on the specialist's skills.

What does a Product Owner do?

To understand the role of a product owner in a team, we first suggest understanding the difference between them and a project manager.

A project manager is a leader. He distributes tasks, ensures that the team adheres to the schedule and is responsible for the quality of the product, namely, for the proper functioning of functions and the absence of errors in the code.

The Product Owner is one of the team members. "An outsider among his own." An employee of the company who defends the interests of the client. Like the project manager, he is responsible for the product itself. But it's not so much about deadlines and following rules, but about content. The Product Owner must be on the same wavelength with the customer and translate their vision into technical specifications that need to be communicated to the team members. At the same time, they must understand the capabilities of the developers and know the approaches used in order to set realistic goals from the start.

There are more similarities between a product owner and a product manager. A product manager ensures that the work is carried out strictly according to the technical specifications (TS). An owner views the development process as a businessman and is not so much concerned with precise adherence to the TS, but rather with ensuring that the end result has the necessary set of functions and benefits for the target audience and the business. By the way, some IT companies are looking for employees who can combine both areas.

It turns out that the Product Owner:

• Communicates with the customer.The specialist must fully immerse himself in the specifics of the business, understand the pain points and figure out what problems the product being developed should solve.
• Forms the vision of the product and plans its development strategy. Based on the information received from the customer and marketing research, the specialist must determine what the web application will look like, what its functions and goals will be.
• Creates presentations for users and shareholders of the project, collects their feedback, makes changes to the technical specifications.
• Draws up a roadmap. Defines goals and features, collaborates with the team to select development methods and tools, defines a development plan and a list of tasks, ranks them in order of importance, and distributes them among team members.
• Manages backlogs.The product owner determines which features will appear first and which can be added later. He or she distributes current tasks among developers, guides the team based on customer feedback and testing, and reprioritizes tasks if necessary.
• Develops technical documentation: user guides, specifications, monetization model for the customer's marketing department (instructions for attracting and retaining customers).
• Evaluates results. The PO tests the product at each stage of development and determines whether the overall vision of the product is being followed or whether something needs to be changed. In fact, he is responsible for progress.
• Ensures communication between team members.The result directly depends on how well the team communicates and how well the developers understand each other.

What skills does a Product Owner need to develop?

A product owner is an intermediary between a client who has a vision of the product but no understanding of how everything works, and developers and technical specialists who need to clearly formulate the task. Therefore, for a "product owner," both soft and hard skills are simultaneously important.

Among the "soft" skills you need to develop:

• Communication skills.It's not enough to just be sociable. You need to be able to listen to your interlocutor, empathize with their problem, and understand their feelings. Sometimes a client doesn't quite understand why they need a website or mobile app. A product owner must get the client talking, learn their true desires and the intricacies of the business.
• Personal charisma.Situations often arise when you have to look for compromises. A client may order a product that is useless for a particular business or, conversely, save on features that are indispensable. The product owner must help the client understand the technical subtleties and show that the developers are on his side.
• Leadership qualities.The quality of the product largely depends on the Product Owner. This is the one who motivates technical specialists, inspires them, and maintains the pace of work.
• Stress resistance.Criticism from the client, a tight deadline, conflicts within the team—such situations will arise. And the fate of the project depends on how well the product owner can adapt and diplomatically resolve disagreements.

The following are important technical skills for a product owner:

• Understanding the intricacies of development. The product owner does not need to be a programmer, designer, or web developer. But they need to understand how everything works and what tools the team uses in order to properly plan time, budget, and distribute tasks.
• Project management skills. Managing a project means distributing tasks, monitoring deadlines, and tracking the overall progress of work on the product. These are all the responsibilities of the product owner.
  Modern teams use cloud platforms to manage projects. You need to be able to use at least some of them. Popular services: Jira, Trello, Azure, Asana, Worksection.
• Knowledge of Agile and Scrum.The Product Owner profession appeared mainly due to the implementation of the principles of flexible development, known as Agile. The main concept of this approach is to give more freedom to developers, simplify all processes, put the result first, and not blindly follow the rules or technical documentation. The most important thing with this approach is to create working software that will benefit the customer and solve their problems.
  

How to become a Product Owner

Today, the demand for Product Owners is only growing. Therefore, employers are willing to pay such specialists salaries at the level of programmers and even higher. According to recruitment.by, product owners can expect a salary from $1,000 to $6,000. But to master the specialty, you don’t need to understand programming languages ​​and cram the material. At the same time, there is rapid career growth here - a good specialist can count on a middle position after just a few months of internship.

It is very difficult to master the profession on your own. Because Product Owner is more about communication. A specialist spends most of their time communicating with clients and the team, planning, and testing. This can only be learned through practice.

This profession is relatively new, so comprehensive educational programs have not yet emerged at universities. Only a few foreign universities, such as Stanford or the University of Minnesota, offer advanced training courses in Agile and Scrum. Large companies, such as Adobe, train specialists in-house. Product owners are most often filled by retrained project managers and even coders, who take on the responsibilities of client communication and team management.

In Belarus, the fastest way to master a profession is through courses. When choosing them, you need to pay attention to the relevance of the programs and the availability of practical experience. And you can get acquainted with the profession through literature. The editors of Skillbox.by share several publications on agile development methods that will be useful not only for beginners:

• Jeff Sutherland "Scrum: A Revolutionary Method for Project Management."
• Roman Pichler "Product Management in Scrum."
• Roman Pichler "Agile Product Management with Scrum."
• Lissa Adkins, "Coaching Agile Teams."
• Simon Sinek, "Start with Why."
• Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, "Understanding Agile: Values, Principles, and Methodologies."
• Cindy Alvarez, "How to Create a Product That People Will Buy: The Lean Customer Development Method."
• Melissa Perry "Product Management Without Mistakes."

And to understand the basics of Scrum and Agile, to understand the concept, we recommend paying attention to the following materials:

• Scrum Guide, written by the creators methodologies, by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.
• Scrum Guide in English.
• A detailed report on Agile.