If you’re the Product Owner or are leading Scrum Teams in your organization, don’t you agree that the accountabilities of the Product Owner involve complex activities, are daunting and highly critical in delivering value? In this blog post, I intend to highlight some of these challenges and provide insights on how Avanade supports our clients in Product Ownership.

Accountabilities of a Product Owner
Two of the most leading product development frameworks our clients use define the Product Owner accountabilities as follows.

The Scrum Framework (©2020 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland) defines that it is the Product Owner is accountable for:

• Maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team
• Effective Product Backlog management, which includes:

• Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal
• Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items
• Ordering Product Backlog items
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood

If the SAFe Framework (© Scaled Agile, Inc.) is being used in your organization, it guides The Product Owner as a key member of Agile Team and serves as the customer proxy:

• 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.
• This role has significant relationships and responsibilities outside the local team, including working with Product Management, Customers, Business Owners, and other stakeholders.

At Avanade, we believe these key accountabilities are required to achieve the best outcomes for our clients. But because we can never know the organizational culture, objectives, and goals of our clients as best as they do, we usually recommend clients to take on the Product Ownership role; but supported by our teams.

How does Avanade support the Product Ownership?
The nature of the work we do usually finds our clients working with new technologies or as part of a transformative program. In these situations, while the client PO has ultimate authority, we provide the services of a Business Architect or Analysts to which they can delegate some of those responsibilities and partner with them on others.

By supplementing the above activities we add value by providing deep industry expertise to support clients throughout the engagement and provide a focused mindset of articulating technology decisions on Product Backlog, insights on product architecture and support the process of enhancing the Product Backlog to make it ready for the Scrum Team.

This partnership also enables those Product Owners who are new to the role to retain focus on key activities within the organization such as driving the customer focus, ensuring there is continued business engagement and alignment to the product vision.

Thanks for reading! I’d like to hear any comments, feedback, or questions from you.