Product Owner is a Samurai with two swords

Samurai, warriors of premodern Japan fought for their masters which were mostly wealthy landowners lived their lives with a code of conduct with bravery, honour, discipline, loyalty above their lives for their masters. The word “Samurai” literally translates to “those who serve”. Samurai used to fight with range of weapons such as bows & arrows, spears, and guns, but their main weapon and symbol was sword. Sharp, slim, and curved blade called Katana and a smaller blade called Wakizashi, and their pairing was a sign that the wearer is a Samurai.

How Product Owners came into being

In wake of changing customer expectations, adoption times of new products have changed the time a company has to recuperate its investment from decades to few months. To resolve this highly complex problem Product Management started in 1930s that announced the shift of product development from project mindset to a product or set of products mindsets which add value to the company. After few decades the role was refined to have below responsibilities.

• Identifying what product to build and align it with the business strategy.
• Building the relevant product for the current generation.
• Marketing the product, ensure customer knows about it & uses it and collect feedback.

In 1990s, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland brought Scrum, a simple agile framework that helps discovering what is relevant and valuable to the customers at the earliest. It resolved the latency in decision making. Scrum introduced a very basic principle, break the complex problem into smaller ones which are easier to tackle, start with the basic set of requirements, acquire the feedback on what customer loves or what it doesn’t and keep on iterating with improvements and enhancements.

Now the purpose of introducing scrum was to make the whole process of product development agile. Many a times Product Managers get too busy with strategic thinking, marketing, customer feedback, product vision, aligning product vision with business strategy that they get disconnected with the team who is building the product and at times had high dependency on Product Manager. Hence, to bring in the required agility and the Scrum introduced a more dynamic role of Product Owner. The role ‘Product Owner’ packaged new set of responsibilities. It scratched the deep-down thought process of people who might think the old-fashioned way and resist the change which was brought in by Scrum principles by saying ‘we are already doing it’.

POs have Katana in one hand

Let’s see some of the primary powers PO has got:

• Write & prioritize epics with benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria which helps to achieve the product milestones.
• Write the user stories for the development team to work on.
• Prepare Business Requirement Documents (BRDs).
• Raise defects encountered by customer or engineering or quality assessment.
• Conduct sprint planning, backlog grooming meetings with development team.
• Managing and prioritizing product backlog.
• Attend daily stand-ups to track the development of features and answer business related queries that team has.
• Facilitate cross functional collaboration with other teams like, UX, Cloud Ops, data extraction, API etc.
• Define objectives for sprint and Program Increment.
• Do the acceptance review at the end of every sprint.
• Plan for the release of next version with improvements or enhancements.
• Prepare release notes for the external or internal users.
• Participate in the technical discussions within development team.
• Acting as customer’s proxy at every stage of development process.
• Evaluate product progress at each iteration.
• Run system demos
• Track Key Performance Metrics to define success after a PI is over.
• Communicate the progress of development team to business stakeholders during iterations.

They got Wakizashi in another hand

As I earlier mentioned, Samurai used to carry sharp, slim, curvy, and long blade which was used to be their main weapon and along with that they carried a smaller sword called Wakizashi which was a plus one in their weapon system. Just like a Samurai, POs have got some secondary powers which they choose to execute.

POs can participate in the below activities, but they don’t own them. They are owned by Product Managers.

• Set-up product strategy, roadmap, and goals.
• Interview customers or record their journey to get the feedback while using the product.
• Track Return on Investment, efforts, time, and level of difficulty it takes to build a feature.
• Launch the product into the relevant market.
• Work with external third parties to assess partnerships and licensing opportunities.
• Develop the core positioning and messaging for the product.
• Set pricing to meet revenue and profitability goals.
• Deliver a monthly or quarterly or yearly revenue forecast.
• Propose an overall budget to ensure success.
• Write Market Requirements Document(MRD) and Product Requirements Document(PRD).
• Run beta and pilot programs with early-stage products and samples.

At last, with so many powers invested in PO, I would say they are the samurai with two swords, Katana, the scrum team at their disposal which converts the vision into reality and Wakizashi, foresightedness of what must be created which stays relevant in that era and delight customers at the same time in the form of product vision, roadmap, and overall strategy.