3 Core Responsibilities of a Product Owner
In my experience, the responsibilities assigned to the role of Product Owner (aka Technical Product Manager) can vary widely. The role of Product Owner (PO) and Product Manager (PM) can also be blurred together, as well with one camp believing they’re basically the same thing and another camp seeing a clear distinction between the two.
Let me outline how we in the Solace Cloud team view the PO role with this diagram, inspired by the Minimum Viable Product Manager concept. In our team, the PO has a deep understanding of the domain and technical aspects of our solution architecture. They use this knowledge to translate the vision and roadmap into reality.
So what are the key qualities we value in Product Owners in PubSub+ Cloud? The following are the three most important.
Be The Quarterback of Features
The core PO responsibility is to understand customer needs and to translate them into delivering great features into production. In our team, this means owning all of the business requirements and clearly defining these requirements into stories. This involves working with the PM to prioritize the backlog of features.
Once the PO selects a feature, they will scope and plan it, working with architects to complete any required knowledge acquisitions. Knowledge acquisitions help the POs to understand possible solution architectures and enables them to create better stories for the development team. With stories defined, the PO will order the backlog and lead feature planning workshops with the scrum team, adjusting and evolving their stories as required to efficiently deliver business value on budget. Finally, once the scrum team completes the work, the PO is there to accept the stories ahead of their delivery to production.
For us, it’s key all stakeholders understand the PO is responsible for delivering the business value all the way into production, including working with our Production Engineering team to coordinate the feature rollout and making sure that any final external collateral is in place as well. To me, this really fits with the quarterback analogy. POs in our team own and drive customer outcomes (reading the field and picking the plays) and coordinating the movement of features (calling audibles when required) through our development pipelines towards delivery (touchdown!).
Be A Domain Expert
POs on our team need to know their shit. :) This means that we challenge our POs to become experts across a variety of domains. Our SaaS (PubSub+ Cloud) provides our customers with advanced event brokers in all the leading public clouds. To participate effectively in discussions with our scrum team, POs must know the cloud services and capabilities in depth. They also know the internal system architecture of our SaaS and are knowledgeable of the interactions between our micro services.
To deliver valuable improvements for our customers, however, they are also experts in event-driven architectures and, specifically, very knowledgeable about our PubSub+ advanced event broker. This knowledge is critical to enable them to design stunning user experiences that unlock the full capabilities of our platform while still maintaining simplicity.
Finally, POs must know our customers inside and out. They talk to our customers, gather feedback and make use of analytics to get a truly deep understanding of how our SaaS is being used and what components are valued most.
This isn't a simple task and it takes new POs some time to build this knowledge. But in our team, long-term success in the PO role requires that you become a domain expert.
Be a Facilitator for the Team
Finally, our POs really work closely with multiple teams to both facilitate the delivery of customer value and to coordinate across the various teams. During feature and story planning, they work most closely with the scrum team to support continuous deployment by ensuring our customer stories are small and decoupled. They participate in scrums and are always available to the scrum team to clarify requirements. This helps them drive stories through the delivery pipeline in the shortest time possible to maximize customer value.
POs work with the Production Engineering team to plan the rollout of each feature and focus on field enablement by coordinating updates to our customer documentation. Finally, they support the product marketing team to enable our field sales team by explaining the details of new features.
In essence, they remove roadblocks so that the team can deliver amazing content to our customers.
Final Thoughts...
As you can see, in our team, Product Owners on our team are critical to our success. The role is both very challenging and very rewarding, with a high degree of responsibility and accountability for customer outcomes. People who are outcome oriented and mission driven excel in this role and can leave a lasting impact on the product they work on. It’s the most fulfilling role I've had yet in my career journey.
