The Product Owner’s skills and contributions are key factors for the success of Agile software development teams.

Here is how the Product Owner’s role is described in the Scrum Guide:

The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.

“The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. Product Backlog management includes:

  • Clearly expressing Product Backlog items;
  • Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions;
  • Optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs;
  • Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next; and,
  • Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed.

The Product Owner may do the above work, or have the Development Team do it. However, the Product Owner remains accountable.

The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the desires of a committee in the Product Backlog, but those wanting to change a Product Backlog item’s priority must address the Product Owner.

For the Product Owner to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. The Product Owner’s decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog. No one can force the Development Team to work from a different set of requirements.”

A good Product Owner needs the following qualities:

  • Engaging Leadership
  • Always Available
  • Visionary
  • Good Communicator
  • Good Listener

How to begin training as Product Owner?

As agileknowhow.com’s partner, Pyxis offers training to support the development of Product Owners.

Scrum through practice: a project simulation that allows beginners and future Product Owners to immerse themselves in their role within a Scrum team.

The Meet the Scrum Product Owner course allows Product Owners to polish their product backlog management practices.

  • Understanding their contribution within a Scrum team
  • Optimizing the backlog’s prioritization according to business value and risk management
  • Writing specifications in the form of user stories
  • Planning development work and monitoring projects in an iterative and incremental way
  • Using Story Mapping to manage the complexity of delivering a coherent and integrated product for every iteration

The Professional Scrum Product Owner certification is a must for experienced Product Owners who wish to become better Agile Product Managers:

  • Understanding the benefits of the Scrum framework
  • Writing planning scenarios with several perspectives, like strategic objectives, mission and projected future
  • Measuring the progress of a product with business value KPIs, like innovation investments, strategic alignment and use index.

mathieu boisvert

Expert in Agility for the past 10 years, he guides teams and organizations in defining a strategy for a smooth implementation of Agile practices and principles. So far, he has trained hundreds of practitioners and coached clients in many different industries both in Canada and Europe.

Mathieu is co-author of “Choisir l’Agilité : du développement logiciel à la gouvernance” in the InfoPro collection of DUNOD.

Lecturer at the Project Management Research Chair of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), he is also a certified trainer of Scrum.org and an active speaker in the Agile community.

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