Articles

To provide software on demand is not an easy task. However if you are following agile rules, the entire situation is different. The success ratio goes up. If asked to provide solutions to millions of community users, the question to ask is – is agile more than enough or is there space for SCRUM?

As a product owner, there is a need for –

1. Scope Commitment
2. Delivery
3. Results

Communities are built as they help people of the same group with the same ideology and they stay together for a long time.

This decides the success and failure in the community. Collaboration with a community must be dependable, this leads to all the fake marketing campaigns inside a community be identified faster and deleted at the same time.  Same way spam from your inbox is detected and pushed to a different folder and deleted after.

In this case, it means that the product owner has to be an active community member, if that’s not possible then, a domain expert who works very close with the product owner has to be active.

Refining a product backlog is the priority for product owner

Product owner has to use different communication methods to when it comes to customer approach.

When dealing with a customer the product owner has to

1. Find a problem
2. Escalate the problem within the community
3. Have a discussion forum for finding a solution.

This is followed by delivery of the product.

The product owner has to create two initial groups

1. Experts Group
2. Product Community group

Product owner should treat this group as a key project stakeholder. Product Owner should interact with experts group very close during implementation phase.

Results have to be provided to the whole community.

However, the sprint results have to be evaluated after each sprint.

The key Business stakeholder of Scrum Projects is the Product Owner One integral responsibility of the Product Owner is to convey the importance and significance of the Scrum Project to the Scrum Team. This is the key for the success of any Agile Project through the use of Product Backlog.

Now let us look at some of the major responsibilities of a Product Owner:

• Creation and Maintenance of the Product Backlog: Scrum framework is mostly used in the software environment and new product development field. This is an on-going job and full time responsibility of the Product Owner. He has to constantly keep refining it especially before any sprint planning meetings.
• Prioritizing of Backlog according to the Business ROI: Product Owner also needs to prioritize and sequence the backlog according to the needs of the business and situations.
• He also elaborates the epics, themes and features into user stories which are feasible enough to be achieved in a single sprint.
• The Product Owner does the job of continuously reminding the Team of the Sprint & Release and ensures that the team remains on track in realizing their goals.
• The Product Owner does the job of continuously engaging the customer and business stakeholders to ensure that the Team is building the right product and delivering the business value expected of it. Also at the end of every Sprint the Product Owner has the opportunity to steer the team in the direction which will create value for the business stakeholders.
• The Product Owner also keeps inspecting the work done by the Scrum Team at the end of every Sprint and has the absolute authority to accept or reject their work or to suggest modifications.
• Product owner also acts as the voice of the Team to the outside world and should ensure that all the channels of communication remains open and the project get the right kind and type of support needed to succeed.
• Has the authority to terminate a Sprint if the Product Owner feels that there is drastic change in direction needed and the Sprint is no longer needed. It may happen in cases where the competitor releases a new product and the client wants a counter response.

The responsibilities of a Product Owner is onerous and there are a lot of hats that have to be worn by him hence choice of a Product Owner must be done wisely as it could lead to success or failure for the entire project which ultimately affect the success or failure of the company.