Product Owner’s Role (in Scrum Methodology)

As the name itself indicates that Product owner is someone who is representative of user. Product Owner may be part of high end user, marketing team, or someone who interacts with user frequently but most important thing is that he should have the solid understanding of the business, future requirements and priority of the product’s component.

Product owner is responsible to create the product backlog in a prioritized order. Most of the time team selects the high priority items from product backlog and creates sprint backlog, but sometime product owner requests team to get the items as per his selection.

Product owner can not force team to select the items from product backlog as per his wish, as finally its team decision to select the items.

Product owner may change the requirement even for those features which are in current sprint and requirements are always welcome in scrum, but the current sprint must go with pre-decided set of task-sets, without any changes. In next sprint only the requirement changes should be considered that too as per the priority.

Product owner have no authority to question the capability of feature-team, as team know better what they are capable for and they should decide the task-set for each sprint. Number of tasks should not be fixed for each sprint.

Product owner should be easily available, approachable, good communication, must be able to articulate his requirements, and must be expert in business understanding, and future requirement changes.