Product Owner: role-related responsibilities illustrated by a practical case
As an introduction, it seemed right to start with a definition of the role of a product owner. The title of product owner appeared in 1995 when Ken Schwabber, an American developer, presented the Scrum framework which prevails when it comes to implementing Agility in organizations. The PO is working closely with a cross-functional team, his/her squad, and has the maximization of the product value as a main focus.
Also, he/she will remain accountable for it during the whole product lifecycle as, along with the squad, anything related to the product enhancement will fall under their responsibility. Further details about the PO role can be found in an article about the do’s and don’ts we published a few months ago, “Agile roles in practice – to do or not to do“.
The definition of a solid product vision is one of the main responsibilities of a PO as it is a key element to keep the course of the product development track.
The product vision needs to be considered as the foundation of the product. The PO evolves in a changing market where he needs to be flexible and swift in adapting his approach. However, the product vision is to be considered as a long-term goal that can be shared with the stakeholders and easily understood by them. So, a strong product vision will be crucial for the product owner to pave a clear way to the destination, federating the squad around it and allowing a better prioritization of the actions to be taken in order to reach it.
The definition of a solid product vision is one of the main responsibilities of a PO as it is a key element to keep the course of the product development track.
The product vision needs to be considered as the foundation of the product. The PO evolves in a changing market where he needs to be flexible and swift in adapting his approach. However, the product vision is to be considered as a long-term goal that can be shared with the stakeholders and easily understood by them. So, a strong product vision will be crucial for the product owner to pave a clear way to the destination, federating the squad around it and allowing a better prioritization of the actions to be taken in order to reach it.
Let’s dive into it with a true story that happened in 2022, at a major actor in the banking sector in Belgium.
A project was launched in order to facilitate the initiation of bank card bulk orders for corporate customers.
The order of a bank card, credit or debit, requires a large amount of information about the company for which the card is produced and the cardholder him/herself, especially in the context of bulk orders. This is often seen as a dealbreaker when a single person on the customer side needs to track his/her collaborators to gather the details required to validate the order.
After performing an analysis, it was considered that a faster time-to-market could be reached by externalizing the development tasks to a third-party provider. This choice was mostly driven by a high commercial pressure materialized by an important amount of pending card deals conditioned by the easiness to collect and provide the needed information.
The PO was appointed to coordinate the production of the solution with a pre-defined provider who was already known at the group level for similar implementation. This last aspect was considered a plus point in order to make it possible for a quick implementation of a customized solution which, in this case, wouldn’t be started from scratch.
The operational track in order to adapt the existing solution with some technical work to synchronize the environments was launched in parallel with the contracting track that included a third-party security assessment and the negotiation of the contractual clauses.
A common good practice is to wait that the collaboration is formalized by a contract before moving forward with the development of the solution. But in this case, in order to gain time, an agreement was made between the bank and its supplier to tackle both at the same time.
The two tracks evolved asynchronously and at some point, the solution to be implemented was about to be final on one hand. But on the other hand, no contract proposition had been submitted to the vendor.
The reason for that is that the third-party security assessment progressed very slowly, there were two main reasons for that:
- The quality of the answers on the questionnaire provided by the supplier was not sufficient
- An internal process of the bank prevented the security assessors to contact directly the supplier to collect clarification
So, when the conclusion of the security assessment was shared, these were based on assumptions and were not reflecting the actual situation of the project. Some clarifications were asked of the PO who had to act as a messenger between the two parties and possibly biased the information as he was relaying it.
In addition to that, nobody at the group level could provide evidence of a security assessment or its related conclusion that would help the PO accelerate the security assessment and converge to the implementation of the adapted solution.
The immediate consequence was a delayed delivery. Indeed, all security issues needed to be addressed with a clear mitigation plan but also, the relationship with the supplier became tense as they had completed their part of the deal but there was still no contract nor an invoice.
As the situation was not settling itself, the PO needed to take care of aligning the stakeholders while keeping the applicable processes in mind. He first gathered the internal stakeholders to have everyone aligned internally. Once the local branch was aligned, the PO initiated a discussion with the colleagues from the group to be able to speak as “one” against the vendor. It seemed that most of the risks highlighted had already been identified when the vendor was first requested by the group colleagues and most of these had been addressed already.
Finally, as the bank stakeholders agreed on the way to go forward, the supplier was contacted so that a clear contracting plan could be set up and to reassure him about the goodwill of each party. The solution was then implemented and is now running.
In conclusion, even if the PO had a clear vision of the objectives he wanted to meet, a good understanding of the market needs and the internal processes, paired with the apparent simplicity of the project, the completion of it happened to be much more complex due to a communication issue.
https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/product-manager-product-owner-differences
https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/7-biggest-pain-points-for-product-owners