Role Product Owner

New Role, work in progress.

Purpose

Our value stream teams build, operate and support specific VSHN products for our customers, end-to-end. We receive work from product management / road map, troubleshooting, and other team internal sources, but most importantly from our customers. If requirements are not checked, the work is not refined and prioritized, the team would end up doing random things that don’t necessarily help us advance our product strategy or solve the most important or urgent customer needs or problems, or one type and source of work could overrule the others.

We need a way for stakeholder requirements to be brought into the team’s backlog and prioritized, so that the product is delivered with most value, is protected, and ensure alignment with our product strategy.

Stakeholders

  • Delegator (often the Management) and Product Management - Needs a person to speak to the team about WHAT the team produces and the progress of that.

  • The own Team and all Team members.

  • The customers of the product as defined by the team’s domain.

Key Responsibilities

This role is the ONLY one that owns a product, defines and prioritizes what the team needs to produce to advance in our product strategy and create the value for our customers. For the team and organization to be successful, we move forward with the decisions evolved by the Product Owner, until there is a reason not to.

For the Organization
  • Know the product, its customers and how the product is implemented and used.

  • Market positioning and competition is known and taken into account.

  • Support the customers and the rest of your Domain’s stakeholders with this product knowledge.

  • Involved partners and vendor products are known and appropriately considered.

  • Write viable product feature definitions.

  • Represent your Domain’s Product(s) in VSHN Product Management and contribute to system level product management decisions.

For the Team
  • Prioritizing requirements from all stakeholders into the team’s backlog, so that it brings maximum value to the Product(s).

  • Translating features into bite-sized tasks for development.

  • Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood by the team.

  • Providing the team an effective balance of work and use of capacity: new product features, changes, maintenance, problem solving, etc.

  • Evaluating the progress and effectiveness of the work, together with stakeholders.

  • Leading and contributing to product documentation.

Key Deliverables

  • Representation of the product and its development progress in Product Management.

  • Clarity about what we need to build in detail.

  • Go-to-person for questions about the Product.

Key Resources

Constraints

Understanding of Leadership
  • The responsibility for the team’s domain stays with the team, not with this role.

  • This role isn’t about deciding for the team how they do things, it’s about making the work - the what - clear.

Role Assignment

  • By default, every team that owns one or multiple VSHN products needs to cover this role.

  • This role description defines the minimum responsibilities to cover, and general constraints.

  • How the team implements this role, is up to the team, under the constraints defined here.


This role is tracked and reviewed as VIP-124