What is my task as Product Owner

The product owner role is a central position in agile teams. It is responsible for the interface between customers and developers, prioritizes requirements and ensures product quality while reconciling economic interests and customer needs.

What are my tasks in the role of Product Owner?

Unfortunately, it often still looks like this in companies: Stakeholders brief product managers with their ideas for a new feature, and they are then supposed to pass the ideas on to the development team - in other words, translate requirements.

Such a situation is anything but a booster for the success of a product. Stakeholder requirements are blindly translated, customers are often neglected and the value is not properly tested. This is not what modern product management should look like. In fact, it usually leads to a high level of frustration among the responsible product owners. They are not really responsible for the success of the product because they cannot control it themselves. They also do not perform all the tasks that are absolutely necessary.

Product Owner tasks include the constant assessment of customer needs and commercial interests to ensure the success of the product. The Product Owner works closely with other team members and faces various challenges on a daily basis. This role requires specialized training and certification programs to develop skills and ensure value maximization of the product.

To understand how to do it better, you can follow Thomas and Sebastian on a walkthrough of the Product Masterclass in today's video. It is structured along the product development cycle. This little insight will also give you a better idea of your tasks as a product manager and how the role of product owner is performed in the Scrum team.

Week 1: Customers and market

Stakeholders are not the market and, in most cases, neither are your customers. Instead, you need to understand the market you are working in and talk to your actual customers on a regular basis. In the Product Masterclass, we do this directly in week 1 with user interviews in the problem space. This way, you learn to really understand what problem you are going to solve for your customers:

• What problems do customers have?
• How are you trying to solve these so far?
• What solutions are already available on the market?

Product Owners analyze customer needs and maximize the value of the product by managing and prioritizing the product backlog. They act as a link between the stakeholders and the development team to ensure that the products developed meet customer needs and fulfill the company's business objectives.

All of these guiding questions will help you as a product manager or product owner to understand your customers' needs and requirements. Interviewing them, gathering feedback and analyzing the competition will help you develop a product that meets the exact needs of the customer. Product Owners use market analysis to guide the development of the product and ensure that it offers the highest value to customers.

Week 2: Stakeholder management

80% of your work is communication. This also includes communicating with stakeholders. It is therefore extremely important to be clear about which stakeholders are important for the success of your product and how you can involve them in product development. Because: Yes, your delivery should not be filled with solutions by stakeholders, but stakeholders such as sales or marketing can give you input on which topics are worth including in discovery.

The product owner plays a crucial role in fostering communication between stakeholders and development teams. Through regular meetings and clear communication channels, the product owner ensures that everyone involved has a common understanding of the product goals and can work together effectively.

Another important aspect is collaboration within and between the teams. The Product Owner coordinates the activities of the various Scrum teams and ensures that communication runs smoothly. This is crucial in order to develop a coherent and successful product.

Week 3 + 4: Product Discovery - Manage & reduce product risks through experimentation

Agility in product teams is not only created in delivery, but primarily in discovery. Here you have the opportunity to validate solutions quickly without code and can thus prevent you as a team from building things that nobody needs. The aim here is to use targeted experiments to filter out what really makes it into development. This is discovery: understand where your risks are and find out what really works for the customer and what doesn't. This saves the entire team a lot of time and unnecessary effort in engineering.

In the Scrum framework, the Product Owner (PO) leads the product discovery and maximizes the value of the product. The PO is responsible for communicating with the development team and stakeholders to ensure that the right priorities are set. By managing the product backlog and the decision-making processes, the PO contributes significantly to the successful implementation of the product vision.

The PO uses the Scrum methodology to manage product development and promote collaboration within the team.

Week 5: Vision and roadmapping

As a product manager, it is your job to show your organization in which direction you are moving with the product and how you are doing it. Not only does a strong product vision help here, but also a plan on how to get there. The keyword is roadmapping. At best, this should not be an elaborate plan for one year, but a plan that you can adapt along the way. This also requires a strong presence and a lot of communication within the company.

The vision and roadmap are a central tool for the product owner to coordinate with the stakeholders.

We know from experience that stakeholder management and roadmap planning are among the biggest challenges for product owners.

Week 6 + 7: Become a good sparring partner for your developers

As a product manager, you don't have to be able to program, but you should understand which tech stack you are sitting on. This will make it easier for you to recognize where there are limitations, where problems occur and how long it will take to build certain features. It will also make you a better sparring partner for the development team and stakeholders.

As a product manager, you should also be heavily involved in discovery in your development team and ensure that the entire team always has a good overview of which topics you will be working on next and why. For example, user story mapping as an alignment tool and data-driven requirements engineering are suitable here. The product owner promotes collaboration within the scrum team, including the scrum master and the developers, which is crucial for the planning and implementation of sprints.

Week 8: Measure whether the feature/product really works

Even if the product has been launched on the market, your work as a product manager is not yet complete. It is now your job to continue to monitor and continuously improve the product. You use data and feedback from customers to identify weaknesses, optimize it and develop new functions and features.

Set yourself apart from the many product managers who focus too much on delivery in their work. Free yourself from the pressure to implement all stakeholder requirements in exactly the same way, take responsibility for the product and offer added value based on the following points:

• Reduce development risks by talking to customers and ensuring a good discovery process.
• Identify key stakeholders and find suitable communication formats.
• Help your organization understand where you're headed with a product vision and roadmap - and take them with you on the journey
• Work closely with the development team and involve them in the discovery process at an early stage.
• Measure whether your features/products really work and iterate the solutions.

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