What is the Product Owner in Agile Development?
The Product Owner is a role that is accountable for delivering value to the business through the prioritization of the Product Backlog. They determine what features are added and which are omitted. This role serves as an interface between the development team, and the customers and stakeholders. The Product Owner is an individual that acts as the “Voice of the Customer”. In larger projects involving multiple Scrum Teams, there may be a single Product Owner assigned to each team.
What concepts does the Declaration of Interdependence address?
The first point of the Declaration of Interdependence is increasing return on investment, or ROI. This goal is achieved by the Product Owner ensuring that the incremental development focuses on the “continuous delivery of value” to the business, in order to enhance ROI. This incremental development is a key component of Agile Project Management where the Agile Principles states that “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software”.
The Product Owner prioritizes the product backlog with the highest value requirements first. This ensures that the next enhancements to be made to the product are those with the greatest value to the customer. If a new request is made that seems more valuable than the next item in the backlog, the Product Owner moves it to the front of the product backlog queue. If a request is made that ranks somewhere above the end of the backlog but not as high as the top, the Product Owner must place it appropriately. If customers or stakeholders make requests that simply do not add enough value to the product, the Product Owner must make the decision to simply say, “no”.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course:
Course Contents
Section 1: Agile Project Management
Section 2: Using the Agile Manifesto to Deliver Change
Section 3: The 12 Agile Principles
Section 4: The Agile Fundamentals
Section 5: The Declaration of Interdependence
Section 6: Agile Development Frameworks
Section 7: Introduction to Scrum
Section 8: Scrum Projects
Section 9: Scrum Project Roles
Section 10: Meet the Scrum Team
Section 11: Building the Scrum Team
Section 12: Scrum in Projects, Programs & Portfolios
Section 13: How to Manage an Agile Project
Section 14: Leadership Styles
Section 15: The Agile Project Life-cycle
Section 16: Business Justification with Agile
Section 17: Calculating the Benefits With Agile
Section 18: Quality in Agile
Section 19: Acceptance Criteria and the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 20: Quality Management in Scrum
Section 21: Change in Scrum
Section 22: Integrating Change in Scrum
Section 23: Managing Change in Scrum
Section 24: Risk in Scrum
Section 25: Risk Assessment Techniques
Section 26: Initiating an Agile Project
Section 27: Forming the Scrum Team
Section 28: Epics and Personas
Section 29: Creating the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 30: Conduct Release Planning
Section 31: The Project Business Case
Section 32: Planning in Scrum
Section 33: Scrum Boards
Section 34: Sprint Planning
Section 35: User Stories
Section 36: User Stories and Tasks
Section 37: The Sprint Backlog
Section 38: Implementation of Scrum
Section 39: The Daily Scrum
Section 40: The Product Backlog
Section 41: Scrum Charts
Section 42: Review and Retrospective
Section 43: Scrum of Scrums
Section 44: Validating a Sprint
Section 45: Retrospective Sprint
Section 46: Releasing the Product
Section 47: Project Retrospective
Section 48: The Communication Plan
Section 49: Formal Business Sign-off
Section 50: Scaling Scrum
Section 51: Stakeholders
Section 52: Programs and Portfolios