Responsibilities and challenges of Product Owners in practice

Abstract

Agile methods have gained popularity in recent years within software development. In Scrum, one of the Agile methods, the Product Owner role is crucial for an Agile team to be successful. A Product Owner has many responsibilities and challenges and the role is therefore interesting to research, as he or she is often the link between the business and the development departments of an organization. It is a key role for organizations to be successful in developing and maintaining software. Additionally, the Product Owner role does not have one specific definition in the available literature, and, in particular, the responsibilities described differ.This case study, conducted at the software development company Spotify, is a description of the Product Owner role. The main focus of the research is to study how the Product Owners identify customers for their teams, how they measure the value of their teams’ work and how they form a vision for their teams. It also describes some of the challenges these Product Owners face each day. Data was gathered by interviewing three Product Owners, a Product Manager and a ScrumMaster. The interviews were supported by direct observation on site. The results indicate that Product Owners are in practice well aware of their responsibilities when it comes to customer involvement, vision and value, and attend to those in one way or another. Because the organization has been growing quickly in recent years, the Product Owners have had to focus more on their inward facing responsibilities, dealing with their own teams to make sure they are functional. The results indicate that when these challenges have been met the Product Owners can look ahead to the future and start to focus on customer involvement, the vision of the product and the value their team is delivering, and all the challenges that emerge when they deal with this part of their role. The Product Owner role is as diverse as the literature describes it and the challenges a Product Owner faces each day are many. The Product Owners need to have one foot in the daily work and one foot in the future, and to lead people to work on the right things at any given moment.