What does it take to be a truly effective product owner?
To explore that, we turned to Lowell Lindstrom, a Certified Scrum Trainer® and one of the early pioneers in Agile software development. In his experience, the people who are best suited to the role thrive on accountability, visibility, and the art of negotiation.
To delve into the nuances of those particular qualities, we’ve broken down the
7 skills you need to be a great product owner.
Customer Delighter
As a product owner, you're not just an administrator, taking whatever the stakeholder says and adding it to the product backlog. Sure, you have to listen to what your stakeholders want, but you have to do more than process information — you have to discover those latent needs that your customer or user hasn't even imagined.
Lindstrom, for example, just started using a new email client and was delighted to discover it had a feature allowing him to easily convert an email message to a PDF. No more converting it to Word first or changing the "destination" option within the print function. Clearly, the team who created this feature had thought beyond the usual requirements of email.