What Is a Product Owner? Responsibilities and Pitfalls

The Product Owner is the person accountable for maximising the value of the product a Scrum Team creates. They decide what gets done, in what order and why, and they are the single owner of the Product Backlog. For the other accountabilities in Scrum, see What is Scrum?

What does a Product Owner do?

According to the Scrum Guide, the Product Owner is accountable for:

• Developing and clearly communicating the Product Goal. The team and stakeholders need to know where the product is heading.
• Creating Product Backlog items and making them clear. Each item should be clear enough for the team to work on.
• Ordering the Product Backlog. Deciding what comes first based on value, risk and the need to learn.
• Keeping the Product Backlog transparent. Everyone should be able to see the list and understand the logic of its order.

The Product Owner can delegate some of this work, but accountability always stays with them.

Why one person?

The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. When prioritisation turns into negotiation, the team gets pulled in a different direction every day. Stakeholders’ requests are of course heard, but the final ordering decision belongs to the Product Owner. The organisation respecting those decisions is a precondition for the role to work.

Skills of a good Product Owner

• Understanding the customer and the business: knowing users’ real problems and the company’s goals.
• Being able to say no: turning down low-value requests, with reasons.
• Having decision authority: a Product Owner who waits for approval on every decision sets the team’s pace.
• Thinking with data: prioritising with usage data, customer feedback and delivery times.
• Staying close to the team: being available enough to answer questions quickly.

Common pitfalls in the field

• The order-taker Product Owner. A Product Owner who adds every stakeholder request to the list without ordering it turns the backlog into a wish box.
• The proxy Product Owner. The real decision-maker is someone else, and the Product Owner just takes notes. The team knows what to do but not why.
• The Product Owner drowning across several teams. One who serves many teams and can’t give enough time to any of them becomes a bottleneck.
• Losing the link to strategy. If the Product Backlog isn’t connected to the company’s strategic goals, the team works hard on the wrong things. Making that link visible means managing portfolio and product together.

Is a Product Owner the same as a Product Manager?

Not exactly. In most organisations, Product Manager is a job title and can cover broader topics such as the market, the business model and pricing. Product Owner is an accountability in Scrum. In many companies, the Product Manager also takes on the Product Owner accountability in the Scrum Team.

Frequently asked questions

Can a Product Owner also be a Developer? Scrum allows it, but in practice, when one person carries both, one of them usually suffers.

Can the Product Owner cancel a Sprint? Yes. If the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete, only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel the Sprint.

How detailed should the Product Backlog be? Work coming up soon should be detailed; work further in the future can be rough. The backlog is a living document that is refined continuously.

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