Skills Required to be a Good Product Owner

We all know getting higher in your roles, comes the higher responsibilities. In agile, a product owner is one of the roles that have higher responsibilities and requires a different set of skills compared to other team members. The role of the product owner is central to the agile framework and methodology. To be a good product owner is a mix of several basic levels as well as management level skills along with high-performing experience.

As the name suggests they need to own the product ensuring to meet the user requirements as well as also think from the team’s point of view in developing it considering the technical aspects. In agile organizations, they are there for value maximization, optimization, product vision, and backlog management. Product owner in agile has lot many tasks to perform which we have already seen in our previous articles but here is a brief explanation of their important roles below.

·       They define product objectives and goals

·       They also explain this goal to stakeholders and teams

·       They explain and ensure that the teams are clear with the product backlog without any ambiguity

·       They prioritize the product backlog

·       Maintain communication throughout the project with team members, scrum masters, and stakeholders for every update

·       They manage the project resources

·       They manage the stakeholder including on-boarding of stakeholders, goal discussions, inviting them to events like sprint review, and making all the discussed information easy for everyone to understand

Now as the role is so diverse with responsibilities it is necessary to have many diverse skills in various areas. Let’s see what the basic skills product owners require to be good in their role.

Communication

Being a human, communication is the very basic step of any progress. Be it a team member, agile coach, or product owner everyone requires to have communication skills. But as a product owner not only understanding and collaborating well with team members and stakeholders will do the job as a communicator but they also must know every channel of effective communication whether email, video, or oral. They must know how to express themselves and their ideas effectively. They must also have clarity about when to be authoritative and when casual. They must be good with senders for decoding the messages.

Decision Making

This is another key skill a product owner must have. Being a senior in a team they are looked most towards for many decision makings. They should be quick thinkers who can make decisions with possible solutions to any problem or task quickly. With building experience, product owners will gain the ability to identify upcoming issues improving their decision-making skills further.

Analytical

As they are the owner of the product and they have the responsibility for a project, the product owner must have analytical skills. They must be fully skilled in collecting, analyzing, and evaluating data and provide a proper solution considering the time factor for improving productivity. Having good analytical skills requires the support of other skills like good critical thinking, creativity, logical reasoning, research, and data analysis. With good analytical skills product, an owner will be first and most importantly able to solve backlog prioritization tasks.

Management

The complete project is the responsibility of a product owner, so they are the ones who need to manage them so the next skill they require is management. Agile project management has five processes initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. With good with project management will make a project successful and help product owner achieve their project goals with ease.

Technical

Being a product owner needs continuous communication with developers and understanding of the technical issues, so it is a plus point if product owner owns technical skills this will help their team members and also product owner to easily understand and solve the issues that occurred along with prioritizing backlog items and better product management. The technical skill of coding, UX design, agile product development methodologies, and abilities to use applications and tools will do the job.

Collaborative

To manage the product development cycle, and assure timely delivery with quality products requires the skill of collaboration among product owners. This requirement can be only field with good collaboration with developer, supplier, and end user.

Being Hard and Soft at Once

The product owner can be considered as a whole and sole of the product management so they must make their team members know them and collaborate with them, but being friendly sometimes gives a negative effect as people neglect and do not take you seriously. So a product owner must be skillful in understanding the situation and act accordingly. They must know how to get work done by being hard as well as soft where ever required.

With these skills, anyone can be a good product owner. But these are not the limitations of skill knowing them will always provide you with an upper hand in agile.

 About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

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