Product Owner Flashcards
Product Owner
The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining Stories and prioritizing the Team Backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or components for the team.
The PO has a significant role in maximizing the value produced by the team and ensuring Stories meet the user’s needs and comply with the Definition of Done. For most enterprises moving to Agile, this is a new and critical role, typically translating into a full-time job, requiring one PO to support each Agile team (or, at most, two teams).
PO responsibilities
Preparation and Participation in PI Planning
As a member of the extended Product Management team, the PO is heavily involved in program backlog refinement and prep for Program Increment (PI) planning and also plays a significant role in the planning event itself. Before the planning event, the PO updates the team backlog and typically reviews and contributes to the program vision, Roadmap, and content presentations.
During the event, the PO is involved with story definition, providing the clarifications necessary to assist the team with their story estimates and sequencing. The entire Agile team, which includes the PO, also work together to determine their team PI objectives for the upcoming PI.
Iteration Execution
Iteration Execution Maintaining the team backlog – With input from System Architect/Engineering and other stakeholders, the PO has the primary responsibility for building, editing, and maintaining the team backlog.
Consisting mostly of user stories, it also includes defects and enablers.
Backlog items are prioritized based on user value, time, and other team dependencies determined in the PI planning event and refined during the PI. Iteration Planning – The PO reviews and reprioritizes the backlog as part of the prep work for Iteration Planning, including coordination of dependencies with other POs.
During the iteration planning event, the PO communicates story detail and priorities and ensures the team aligns and agrees on a final iteration plan.
Just-in-time story elaboration – Most backlog items are elaborated into user stories for implementation. This may happen before the iteration, during iteration planning, or during the iteration. While any team member can write stories and acceptance criteria, the PO maintains proper flow.
Apply Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) – POs collaborate with their team to detail stories with acceptance criteria and examples in the form of acceptance tests. See the BDD article for more details.
Accepting stories – The PO works with the team to agree on accepted story completion.
This includes validating that the story meets acceptance criteria, that it has the appropriate, persistent acceptance tests, and that it otherwise complies with its Definition of Done (DoD). In so doing, the PO also assures a level of quality, focusing primarily on fitness for use.
Understand enabler work – While POs are not expected to drive technological decisions, they are supposed to understand the scope of the upcoming enabler work and collaborate with System and Solution Architects/Engineering to assist with decision-making and sequencing of the critical technological infrastructures that will host the new business functionality.
This can often be best accomplished by establishing a capacity allocation, as described in the Team Backlog article.
Participate in team demo and retrospective – POs collaborate with their team and any other stakeholders in the team demo.
They also participate in the Iteration Retrospective, where the teams gather to improve their processes and are active in the Agile Release Train’s (ART’s) Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop.
Program Execution
Iterations and Agile teams serve a larger purpose; the frequent, reliable, and continuous release of value-added solutions.
During each PI, the PO coordinates dependencies with other POs. This often occurs in weekly PO sync events (see the PI article for more information).
The PO also has an instrumental role in producing the System Demo for program and Value Stream stakeholders
Inspect and Adapt
Teams address their larger impediments in the I&A workshop.
There, the PO works across teams to define and implement improvement stories that will increase the velocity and quality of the program.
The PI system demo is part of the I&A workshop.
The PO has an instrumental role in producing the PI system demo for program stakeholders.
To ensure that they will be able to show the most critical aspects of the solution to the stakeholders, POs also participate in the preparation of the PI system demo.
Content Authority
Fan-Out Model of Product Manager, Product Owner, and Agile Teams
Successful development is, in part, a game of numbers in the Enterprise. Without the right number of people in the right roles, bottlenecks will severely limit velocity. Therefore, the number of Product Managers, POs, and Agile teams must be roughly in balance to steer the ART. Otherwise, the whole system will spend much of its time waiting for definition, clarification, and acceptance. Instead, SAFe recommends a fan-out model, as illustrated in Figure 2.
