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.
Storyteller
Great product owners go beyond the mechanics of chopping up a user story into the product backlog and sending it to developers. As a product owner, your mission is to think about what will transform that story into a product feature that — you guessed it — delights the user.
Let's take another email example. Say a backlog item for a ridesharing company is to provide a receipt to users via email. What is the broader story? Maybe the user is a busy person on the way to the airport, and she needs to create an Excel expense report based on that receipt. If that's the case, you can think of additional information that will be helpful, such as payment method (PayPal or credit card), document options (e.g., PDF), pick-up and drop-off location, distance traveled, etc.