Product Owner
The product owner is one of the six roles in the Scrum process. In addition to the Scrum Master and the development team, the product owner is one of the key players in the Scrum process. They are responsible for increasing the value of the product in the development process and they lead the team.
Basic role of the product owner
The Scrum is a model for agile software development. With this method, new tasks are defined daily in the form of daily scrums. The aim is to complete projects as quickly as possible using sprints, and at the same time achieve good results. The product owner plays a key role in this process, as they are responsible for the success of the entire team. However, although the product owner is responsible for assigning tasks, they should not be misunderstood as a manager. The product owner is not the supervisor of the development team, but rather the contact person in case of questions or problems. The product owner also represents the interests of customer or steakholders, and is the contact person for them. What a product owner is exactly is shown in this YouTube Video from a Scrum-Guide.
Tasks of the product owner
The product owner performs a variety of tasks in the Scrum team. They communicate regularly with the customer, finds out about the desires and needs of the customer, and presents these to their team. The product owner is responsible for ensuring that the customer's specifications are taken into account in software development. Other tasks of the product owner are:
- Product features:
The product owner determines which properties the final product should have, depending on the wishes of the customer and the user.
- Prioritization:
The product owner is responsible for setting priorities for the processing of individual tasks.
- Control:
The product owner examines the functionality at the end of a sprint and determines whether it can be presented to the customer or not yet acceptable.
- Backlogs maintenance:
The product owner maintains the backlog. For this purpose, they develop user stories, from which the tasks for the development team can be derived.
- Task assignment:
The product owner determines which tasks the development team should process next. However, how the team accomplishes these tasks does not fall within their area of responsibility. Once the tasks have been assigned, they remain in place and are not arbitrarily changed during a sprint.
- Responsibility:
The product owner is responsible for the success or failure of the project.
The product owner is never a direct part of the development team. They are therefore not able to work actively as a developer or similar specialist, as these two more or less contradictory positions could lead to conflicts of interest.
Meetings
A Scrum project has several types of meetings. The regular sprints, in which the development team presents the functions recently created, are particularly important for the product owner. The product owner also ideally takes part in the daily scrums, which are used to allocate tasks within the project team. However, they are only invited as a passive participant so that they can stay up to date. The distribution of tasks within the development team is carried out by the team members alone.
Leadership tasks
A product owner essentially requires good leadership skills, because they assign tasks to the team and are an important contact person for problems. Nevertheless, there is no disciplinary relationship between the product owner and the development team - they are not the supervisor of the employees. It is important, however, that they has sufficient powers to deal with the areas of his project, for example. For example, you can decide on the scope of functions, costs or prioritization of tasks.
Classification in online marketing
Agile methods are advantageous in online marketing because they are often about speed and efficiency. This enables agile scrum teams to react quickly to changes in web development. Product owners play a central role in this process, as they represent the central interface between customers and development teams and can thus also ensure short distances and fast response times. Scrum teams are possible not only for web development but also in web design, UX design or content production.