Product Owner

The product owner is one of the roles defined in the scrum framework. The other roles are the Scrum Master and the developers.

In general, he is someone that has a really good understanding of the business, organization, and market. He represents the users and other stakeholders on the project. Consequently, his responsibility is to have a vision of the functionalities of the product that add value to the organization and to communicate those functionalities to the team. This responsibility is achieved by keeping a product backlog. A product backlog is a prioritized list of the product requirements.

The Scrum product owner works directly with the product manager to assess product requirements for the product backlog. Then the product owner takes the product backlog to the team.

After the scrum team looks to the prioritized product backlog and selects the highest priority items. In other words, the teams choose the items to deliver at the end of the next sprint (iteration). Next, the team builds a sprint backlog with the selected items. In the end, the team commits to execute a set of activities in the sprint and the product owner commits not to take new requirements to the team during the sprint. Still, requirements can change, and probably they will, but only out of the sprint. Once the team starts to work on the sprint, she stays focused on the defined target for the sprint. Consequently, the team does not accept new requirements.

The product owner is also responsible for accepting the sprint deliverables and confirming that they meet the requirements defined in the sprint backlog of the sprint.