What are the typical activities of Product Owner?
The Product Owner is a role in Scrum project management that responsible to maintain and develop products. As described in the Scrum Guide, a Scrum Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team. However, some companies are of the opinion that Scrum has the most significant tools in software development whereas other opine that other project management such as Kanban is more useful than Scrum. Actually It depends on what project we are encounter.
For me, both Scrum and Kanban have a Product Owner who leads and give direct interaction with the scrum team. They provide product requirement documents (PRD) to set goals and missions and ensuring that product backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all. PRD makes Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog.
This PRD has its greater effect ensuring that product backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all. It also plays a very important role in clearly expressing user stories for each Product Backlog items. Right from the user stories to the product backlog items, product owners play a very important role in maximizing the value of the product. The product owner must know every backlog that already defined by the stakeholder or him/herself.
Scrum master, on the other hand, is important in order to help the Development Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items. The development team finds out product backlog by self-organizing. They are cross-functional, with all the skills as a team necessary to create a product Increment.
In my opinion, we can use Design Thinking to make PRD more significant. As Product Owners in the early time, we need empathy with user or stakeholders to define what is the user stories are.
It appears that the ideate will triggered by empathizing to help define the problem or request. For example, if user needs a feature to help them change their default phone number, we need to define what is their goal, background, and assumption first. That’s why as a Product Owner we need a multi-discipline background and combining the technical, design, and business side. To put in a nutshell, the Product owner will always collaborate with the Business and Design team to define a perfect-product to deliver for user or customers.
