Product Owner

The Product Owner is one of the three accountabilities, or roles, in Scrum, alongside the Scrum Master and the Developers. The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product the team builds, which in practice means deciding what is most worth doing next and managing the product backlog. According to the Scrum Guide, the Product Owner is one person, not a committee, although that person may represent the needs of many stakeholders.

Day to day, the Product Owner develops and communicates the product goal, creates and clearly describes backlog items, agrees on acceptance criteria, orders the backlog by value and risk, and answers the Developers' questions quickly. They talk constantly with customers, users, and stakeholders such as sales, support, and leadership, and turn competing requests into one coherent order, which often means saying no. At the sprint review they inspect the finished increment with stakeholders and adapt the backlog. They decide what gets built and why, but not how the Developers do the work, and they don't assign tasks.

A Product Owner is like a ship's captain who chooses the destination and the order of the ports, while the crew decides how to sail. For the role to work, the organization has to respect the Product Owner's decisions; a Product Owner without real authority becomes a messenger who passes requests along without setting priorities.

The Product Owner is often confused with a product manager. Product manager is a job title found in many companies, covering market research, strategy, pricing, and launches, while Product Owner is a specific accountability defined by Scrum. One person often does both, but in large companies a product manager may set the strategy while one or more Product Owners work closely with teams. The Product Owner is also distinct from the Scrum Master, who focuses on how effectively the team works rather than on what it builds.