I came to agile beginning as a coach, but as I was a business analyst in the first years of my career, I have rather played the role of Product Owner, or PO’s coach, or PO assistant.

The difficulty of being a PO is that he has several responsibilities that require various skills.

Responsibilities :
The PO is the one to decide what the product must be, after collecting the needs of various stakeholders. And he has to be one (not several), because it delays decision and reduces understanding. But he has also to write acceptance tests to describe the features to the development team in a way they understand, he has to test the product, or at least to approve the developed features…

Skills :
Understanding of business stakes
Collecting requirements, leading user workshops
Analysis and synthesis
Communication
Basic technical notions

As a matter of fact, the teams I have worked with have appreciated the fact that I’m very result oriented (business aspect of the PO) but that I also can sit down next to a developper and understand what he is doing because I am also a computer engineer. I know I am a rare combination, because, as said above, “most organizations tend to encourage specialization of their employees”.

When a client wants to set up an agile project, I encourage him to choose a PO strongly aware of business stakes (a PO business oriented), available 1 day per week for the team, and a PO assistant, preferably a business analyst with some technical notions and good communication skills, working within the team, 5 days per weeks.
The PO and the PO assistant both manage the backlog :
- the PO writes macro user stories and define their priority
- the PO assistant refines the macro US in US fitting the INVEST criteria
- the PO assistant writes acceptance tests for US
- the PO assistant propose to the PO a list of US to present in the next planning game, they discuss together, the PO decides
- the PO assistant answers the questions of the team during the sprint, makes minor decisions, but refers to the PO when something big is to be decided
- the PO assistant tests the US as soon as they are done
- the PO validates (or not) the US presented by the team in the sprint review

I’ve found out that this combination is really working in the project I’ve made. Have you set up such roles in your Scrum Team ? If yes, are you satisfied about it ?

Emilie

I have just published an article on the absence of the product owner, which seems to be a bit contradictory with your post!

In any case, I would like to republish your post on the product owner under the scrum category on PM Hut. Please either email me or contact me through the “Contact Us” form on the PM Hut website in case you’re OK with this.